[copperx]

I agree that in "Swift to JavaScript transpiler" the word would be replaced with compiler and nothing would be lost; however, by your own definitions you can see that 'transpiler' is more specific than 'compiler.' Someone out there saw a need for the word, just like someone saw a need for coupe and sedan.

You shouldn't worry until academia starts using it. Oops. Here's an article with 'transpiler' on the title: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2173694

It's a good thing that English is descriptive and not prescriptive.

[closure]

I don't think it's a meaningful term because there is no reasonable definition, specifically of where you draw the line.

cfront compiled C++ to C, so it's a transpiler, right? Or is that just an unimportant implementation detail?

Everything targeting LLVM IR is a transpiler, because it's just source-to-source, with the second source being LLVM IR.

Similarly things targeting the JVM or CLR - all transpilers because both of these are relatively high level targets. They might not be something you would consider a "source language", but for many people assembly language is a perfectly reasonable source language, and thus...

Everything compiling to assembly language is a transpiler. The target language is assembly.

Having worked on compilers for over two decades it just comes across as a made-up term by people who don't understand that what a compiler does is translate from one language to another (be it another "source language", ASTs, linear IRs, VM bytecodes, assembly languages, or executable code).

I don't think I'm being particularly pedantic here. Compilers simply generate another form that one person or another might consider a source language (in fact people working on JITs most definitely think of their input as the source language).

[galacticpony]

Yes, cfront could be considered a transpiler, but the term wasn't coined back then.

IRs, ASTs and bytecodes are not programming languages. If you insist otherwise because "some might consider it that way", you have no business criticizing the use of words, to be honest.

There are textual representations for these things, but even then people rarely program in those (LISP being an exception). Assembly language is a textual representation for humans to read and sometimes program in. If you have some program that actually translates to assembly language as a target, by all means, call it a transpiler if you want.

[closure]

> IRs, ASTs and bytecodes are not programming languages. If you insist otherwise because "some might consider it that way", you have no business criticizing the use of words, to be honest.

That's not what I am saying. The point is that compilers make many transformations from "language" to "language", it just happens that other "source languages" are sometimes the target.

> If you have some program that actually translates to assembly language as a target, by all means, call it a transpiler if you want.

For a very long time that was the model most compilers used, and in fact people (mostly those espousing to be advocates of the UNIX philosophy of building small tools that could be chained together) would rail against compilers that directly generated machine code rather than generating assembly that was run through a separate assembler.

So if a compiler that generates assembly source is a transpiler, then the by definition most compilers are transpilers (and all transpilers are compilers which people seem to agree with).