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by nimitkalra 3810 days ago
From what I've noticed, these "transpilers" output code that is readable (the code itself is written as though a human wrote it) where as "compilers" output code that has been optimized and show effects of name mangling in the code itself, etc. Just an observation.

I think it makes sense to use a different term for this "compiler"-esque behavior. For example, I might edit the output of CoffeeScript generated Javascript whereas I wouldn't know how to modify the output of gcc.
1 comments
pjmlp 3810 days ago
The output of gcc can be straight readable Assembly, once upon a time a normal language to write business applications in.

Also C compilers used to generate Assembly text files, which were then piped into the Assembler.

So no, transpiler doesn't make any sense.

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kqr 3810 days ago
This is even better highlighted by something like the GHC compiler, which compiles Haskell to (ultimately) machine code, because it does this in several steps:

1. As a first step, it "transpiles" Haskell to the very similar high-level intermediate language called Core. I could read and write programs in Core without too much effort because it's still a very high-level language.

2. Then it "transpiles" the Core code to the not significantly lower level STG source code – human readable, but starts dealing in a little lower-level stuff and contains much fewer bells and whistles. I'd prefer not to work in STG, but I totally could if I had to.

3. After this, it again "transpiles" the STG source code to the C-- (C-minus-minus) intermediate language, which is decidedly low-level (slightly lower level than regular C code), but there's still a clear and relatively simple translation between STG and C--.

4. As a final step, it "transpiles" the C-- source code to assembly (a closer match than you may think, coming from C), which can be assembled into machine code.

At no point in this pipeline is there a significant magic translation being made – despite the fact that Haskell is probably one of the most high-level languages we know and machine code is as low-level as you get.

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