Scala to JavaScript compilation effective?

Question

I just read about the java 2 javascript parser and the demo with scala.

Do you have any experience with this framework?

What about performance?

Can i use existing JS code/frameworks?

I appreciate any help.

EDIT

This is a very good scala to javascript cross compiler: https://www.scala-js.org/

Answer 1

I did this more than a year ago. Performance is ok, but code size tends to be big. I would not recommend it for production, but can give away the code if usefull. There are other efforts to run Scala on the browser. Best would be to create a JavaScript backend to an existing Scala compiler.

Here are some other projects to look after:

http://greedy.github.com/scala/

https://github.com/scalagwt

https://github.com/alvaroc1/s2js

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

http://jscala.org/

Answer 2

I've never found these "language X to JavaScript" tools to be worth using. Debugging, quality of code generation, interfacing and using native JS libraries, etc., etc. mostly get compromised. CoffeeScript is an exception, because it is a new syntax for JavaScript, not an entirely separate and unrelated language.

If you need to use JS (or another language for that matter), embrace it and learn it.