Am I the only one who just plain doesn't understand the value these tools provide? From my perspective, why not just _write_ javascript? Seems ridiculous. I mean, they're fun and all, but no one sets out to do a project of meaning or scale and chooses these tools, do they?
For those that think JavaScript makes a good VM format for the web, I've written a couple blog posts recently on this topic:<p><a href="http://chadaustin.me/2011/01/native-client-is-widely-misunderstood-and-what-google-should-do-about-it/" rel="nofollow">http://chadaustin.me/2011/01/native-client-is-widely-misunde...</a><p><a href="http://chadaustin.me/2011/01/digging-into-javascript-performance/" rel="nofollow">http://chadaustin.me/2011/01/digging-into-javascript-perform...</a><p>Basically, we need another 10x to 30x in performance for JavaScript to match native code performance...
Added emscripten which to my untrained eyes seems like the place where a lot of gains can be made. You can gain a lot by removing the middleman but sometimes you can gain a lot by adding one.
NS Basic/App Studio compiles Visual Basic style BASIC to JavaScript + HTML5. Also includes an IDE. Targets iOS and Android. (<a href="http://www.nsbasic.com/app" rel="nofollow">http://www.nsbasic.com/app</a>)
This is a great list. I was just thinking about what might be out there the other day. I'm very interested in Ruby --> JS. However haven't tried them. I followed Charles Nutter's work on JRuby for a while and it seems to me that it's extremely involved to actually compile a fully functioning ruby into another language and/or bytecode.
How about Links at <a href="http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/" rel="nofollow">http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/</a> and HOP at www.hop.inria.fr in the tierless category. Also, why isn't there a tierless JS since we can already run JS on the client and server side? I asked this question here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068395" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068395</a>
Mascara (<a href="http://www.mascaraengine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mascaraengine.com/</a>) compiles a typed version of ECMAScript (based on Harmony and other proposals for ECMAScript extensions) into JavaScript. It is backwardly compatible with JavaScript, so you can gradually upgrade code to take advantage of it.
Thank you for posting this list! I don't think I would have ever heard about <a href="http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/</a> otherwise. It seems like a really big deal, I'm very surprised I haven't heard about it before. Def. checking it out.
Fantom (<a href="http://fantom.org/" rel="nofollow">http://fantom.org/</a>) also compiles to javascript. However this platform is supported via direct AST transformation not runtime bytecode generation as for JVM or CLR.