The simplest way to compile CoffeeScript on Windows

A while back I did a post on running the LESS.js compiler on Windows using the venerable and ubiquitous Window Script Host (WSH: providing JavaScript console scripting since Windows 98… when John Resig was still in 8th grade). At the time I tried something similar to generate JavaScript from the wonderful CoffeeScript language, but I couldn’t get it working due to what I assumed were shortcomings in WSH’s JScript engine. There are plenty of other options out there for compiling CoffeeScript, but incur various third-party dependencies as detailed in this StackOverflow question.

But on a whim the other day I revisited it and thankfully now it does work on plain old WSH without any coaxing (not sure what changed, or what I was doing wrong last time). I took the full browser-based coffee-script.js and wrapped it with a simple *.wsf and batch file to handle command-line options.

Download

It’s on github, natch: https://github.com/duncansmart/coffeescript-windows

Usage

To use it, invoke coffee.cmd like so:

coffee input.coffee output.js

You can also pipe to and from it if you are so inclined via stdin/out. Errors are written to stderr.

In the test directory there’s a version of the standard CoffeeScript tests which can be kicked off using test.cmd. Note that the test just attempts to compile the standard set of  *.coffee test files but doesn’t execute them.

Hope it helps; comments appreciated!