I feel like one key difference between Ruby being written in C and CoffeeScript being compiled to Javascript is the debug information. As the author of the attack on CoffeeScript mentioned, being able to debug CoffeeScript code requires you to understand the JavaScript debug output and translate that back into CoffeeScript. Other than that, I agree with all of your points.
This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Unless you have a full developer environment there seems to be a big practical difference between your VM being written in C and compiling to C.
Comments
I feel like one key difference between Ruby being written in C and CoffeeScript being compiled to Javascript is the debug information. As the author of the attack on CoffeeScript mentioned, being able to debug CoffeeScript code requires you to understand the JavaScript debug output and translate that back into CoffeeScript. Other than that, I agree with all of your points.
This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Unless you have a full developer environment there seems to be a big practical difference between your VM being written in C and compiling to C.