[monocasa]

Nope.

There's the (albeit not 100% correct) meme that C is portable PDP-11 asm. What is correct in my mind is that PCC has much fewer, much less complicated transformations to go to PDP-11 (or M68k) asm than Babel does to go from ES-next to ES5.

But for some reason Babel is a transpiler because it's all high level and that's magically different. And no one in their right mind would attempt to call the c compiler of the 1980s a transpiler.

[svnsets]

The only difference between the two in my mind is that the output from a transpiler is likely going to have a ton of bloat, require additional transforming, and be a much larger amount of code than the sum of the inputs. Whereas something like the Closure Compiler actually optimizes and eliminates dead code. They are the same thing though from an ideological standpoint though.

[monocasa]

I mean, early PCC didn't have data flow analysis, or eliminate dead code, and was known for head scratching levels of stuff like spilling registers on the stack that didn't need to be spilled. Was the c compiler of the 1980s a transpiler?

[sigjuice]

Even the Babel project has the good taste to call themselves a compiler. https://babeljs.io says this in very large letters

Babel is a JavaScript compiler.