There’s a new release of CoffeeScript designed to sort out minor problems.

CoffeeScript 1.8.0 offers an easier way to write JavaScript, as programs written in it compile one-to-one into JavaScript.

The official CoffeeScript website says the language aims to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly from CoffeeScript, and the compiled output remains readable, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript runtime, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

The “main” improvements added by the update start with some minor enhancements to source maps that help debug CoffeeScript from errors in the generated JavaScript. They now use .js.map as the file extension rather than just .map. More usefully, the location data for string interpolations has been fixed so that source maps are no longer out of sync.

The CoffeeScript REPL has fixes for the latest node. It is also now exported and you can make it a required module using

 require 'coffee-script/repl'

Other changes are very minor - the compiler no longer crashes on unterminated, single-quoted strings; and the error marker in error messages is now correctly positioned if the code is indented with tabs. The developers have also fixed a slight formatting error in CoffeeScript’s source map-patched stack traces.

CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas has described the language as stable and mostly finished, with no major changes planned for the future.

The 1.8 release is available on the CoffeeScript site and on Github.

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