IcedCoffeeScript

Speaker: Maxwell Krohn

I cofounded OkCupid.com back in 2003. It was my fateful decision to base our whole stack on a single-threaded event-based library written in C++. It sucked; our code was stuffed with callback spaghetti and pyramids of death. But all of that changed when in 2006, we wrote the “Tame” system for C++, which we presented at USENIX ATC in 2007. This new system was compatible with the old code, but drastically improved our productivity by allowing straight-line code on either side of an a network call, much like threads supported all along.

Most JavaScript and CoffeeScript systems work like OkCupid’s did in 2005. But two JavaScript systems I’ve written — TameJS and IcedCoffeeScript — change all of that. They bring the same language primitives to node.js and the browser that Tame brought to OkCupid’s C++ libraries. These primitives are more powerful than threads and more manageable than hand-rolled callback code. If you give them a chance, they will make your JavaScript projects cleaner, more manageable, more parallel and therefore better performing.