[vsnf]

Back in University, I had a Programming Languages professor who spent an entire lecture ranting about the term transpiler and how ridiculous he thought it was. Although I never shared his distaste for the term to the same degree, I anyways felt somewhat kindred with him on it. It's a useful term if you want to draw a distinction (for whatever reason), between moving from a human-readable language to a computer-readable one (compiling) vs moving from a human readable language to a different human readable one (transpiling), but I've never seen a reason to draw such a distinction.

[ethanwillis]

Well technically you can read those computer-readable ones too. And even become somewhat proficient. It's just that it's "harder". And as a second trick, a computer can even "read" the human-readable languages as well :)

I don't know if there's any actual good distinction to draw that won't have problems. I'd be interested to listen to people theorize on what the distinction is.

[Akronymus]

Would LLVM IR be something you compile or transpile to?

[vsnf]

It's compilation all the way down. I write C#, and it is compiled to CIL, which gets further compiled via the JIT into asm.

CIL, or JVM bytecode, or LLVM IR is just one more step in the compilation chain.