fengari VS coffeescript

it should be possible, the article mentions https://fengari.io/ (a Lua VM written in JavaScript)

Check out Fengari or Lapis. Fun fact: itch.io is written primarily in Lua, and started by the same person who made Lapis and MoonScript.

I was real excited to see these recently... have you tried any? https://fengari.io/ is the one I was most intrigued by.

Hello, there is also fengari: https://fengari.io/

Other languages have done that :)

Lua in the browser: https://fengari.io/

And then you can use that to run Fennel, a Lisp that compiles to Lua https://fennel-lang.org/

I think TypeScript also has a script you can include that lets you put your TS code in a special script tag, and it gets compiled in-browser.

just use lua, it’s what should have been used for web scripting anyways

Please stop this stuck in the mud nonsense. Anyone stumbling upon lua.org might think the project is dead already. The material is great, close to the best, but its presentation is pure shite. Not mobile friendly (what kinds of device do you think the majority of people in the Global South use?). We live in a world of code highlighting, none of that in PiL. We live in a world where Fengari allows Lua to run in the browser, does that make an appearance on lua.org, allowing users to immediately play with the language? Of course not! It's almost as if the Lua team is trying to push away potential users.

why not use lua

Just use lua https://fengari.io/

Definitely the most surprising use-case for Lua that I've seen is http://lua.space/webdev/why-we-rewrote-lua-in-js which discusses https://fengari.io/.

That said, there are ways to embrace the JS ecosystem without actually using JavaScript. Many popular languages have transpilers that will convert code written in that particular language into something that will run natively in a web browser (in other words, JavaScript). Even TypeScript is a language that gets transpiled into JavaScript, so it's not that outrageous of a concept, it just gets more difficult to do the further you get away from languages that don't already look like JavaScript.

As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language.

CoffeeScript

On the other hand, companies choose React because that's where all the developers are. If you want to build something that can be maintained years from now, you better not choose the next hype train that goes straight to nowhere (remember CoffeeScript ?). You want something battle tested that has stood the test of time, where you won't have trouble finding developers to scale once you need to. And nobody ever got fired for choosing React.