[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).