I would encourage anyone looking at a C# to javascript compiler to check out typescript first.
I've seen projects use a compiler similar to this, and while writing C# sounds great to developers who already know C#, the differences between the C# source and the generated JS make debugging and maintenance difficult.
In my experience typescript provides C# developers much of what they are looking for - type safety, familiar class definitions, etc - while still being very easy to debug.
Agreed, I wish people would look at TypeScript more in general. It really is a great product that doesn't seem to be catching on very well.
Like many others I think the future of JavaScript is going to be treating it like bytecode. Write your application in whatever language you want for developer convenience and debugging, them push it out to javascript for processing. Seems to be where things are headed.
IMHO the reason for such a compiler is sharing code between client and server. From that standpoint your advice is reasonable for C# programmers only if they are ready to abandon C# altogether and switch to node.js on server.
That's true - if you have some sort of business logic you want to run on both client and server, this or Script# could be very useful.
But if you're looking to write C# in the browser because you love C# and have heard JS is terrible (a BIG factor I've seen used when pushing tools like this), I'd look at typescript first.
> while writing C# sounds great to developers who already know C#, the differences between the C# source and the generated JS make debugging and maintenance difficult.
i love resharper for C#, but it's typescript support is... lacking. Easier (and better intelisense discovery) to use the official VS plugin for Typescript (and comes built into the newer versions of VS)
the new VS 2015 preview uses Roslyn for typescript. honestly I prefer VS 2013 better right now, the VS 2015 preview crashes regularly, plus is missing important extensions (and the Web Essentials plugin for it misses features such as TSLint)
I've seen projects use a compiler similar to this, and while writing C# sounds great to developers who already know C#, the differences between the C# source and the generated JS make debugging and maintenance difficult.
In my experience typescript provides C# developers much of what they are looking for - type safety, familiar class definitions, etc - while still being very easy to debug.