Dart goes beyond what CoffeeScript offers. For instance, Dart can use a lot of library code and try to produce a final script that ships only the methods your program uses.

Dart has many parts to it. There's a Dart Editor that uses Eclipse as a foundation but actually strives to be a lightweight editor. The Dart compiler shipped with the Dart Editor is the more stable one in my experience, but it tends to produce scary JavaScript at the moment. If you tell it to produce "optimized" JavaScript it will try harder to make the final script smaller, but it isn't too pretty. The Editor will get some good debugging features soon.

Then there's a new compiler that's still being developed for Dart called Frog. It actually produces much more decent JavaScript code.

And there's a VM for Dart that's useful for testing and developing smaller scripts that can run without the browser. There's a promise that the VM will be integrated with a branch of the WebKit browser component which should help with making use of the VM in a browser environment. Maybe next week we'll get a first version of it. (I speak as a user.)

As they say, the sky is the limit. I'm excited and have written thousands of Dart code, much of which has been converting my JavaScript library code to Dart.

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...