[afri]

(Disclaimer: I work on StratifiedJS)

The point about not being able to use 'normal' JS debugging facilities with StratifiedJS (or other 'higher-level' languages compiling to JS) is certainly true, but IMO it is not nearly as bad as it sounds.

Debugging highly asynchronous programs (whether written in 'straight' JS or in a higher-level language) with a 'normal' JS debugger isn't really much help: the callstacks that the debugger spits out in no way correlate to the asynchronous actions that are going on.

Having an abstraction that sits on top of JS, as it is the case with StratifiedJS, gives us the opportunity to write a debugger that spits out stack traces that actually reflect the true causal state of your program logic.

Granted, we don't have such a debugger yet, but we will in the not-too-distant future. What is already working is that StratifiedJS will amend exceptions with the correct linenumber and module name of the original StratifiedJS sources that threw the exception. So you don't have to manually correlate the generated source code with the original SJS source code, like you would need to do in systems that do a more or less 1-to-1 translation to JS.