> Why should that "scrap years of JavaScript optimization"? That doesn't make sense.
The bytecode that browsers compile JavaScript to are incompatible with each other. They would either have to pick one (wouldn't happen) or design one together (wouldn't happen).
A designed by committee bytecode would also effectively eliminate browser vendors' ability to compete on speed.
> Source-to-source-translation _always_ sucked and that's known for a few decades already.
In what way? From what I read Gambit Scheme compiles to C that is as fast as hand-crafted C. I would assume that CoffeeScript is no slower than regular old JavaScript. So if not speed, how are these things sucking?
