[catapart]

Right on. That makes sense. Thanks for spelling it out!

I do think aligning the semantics will be the easier part, honestly, because I'm only trying to transpile the supported source for the game engine. Since that's all written in typescript and I'm not guaranteeing full parity if you are trying to transpile arbitrary ts/js (only the source that can be parsed the same way the game engine is parsed), I'm expecting it to be a near 1-to-1 conversion. I started writing everything in C# and copied the structure to JS, knowing that this was the eventual plan, so the JS can actually be re-written as C# with a pretty simple regex tokenizer.

My hope, here, is that by having the code morphed into an IR, that the IR would be some kind of well-known IR that - for instance - C# could also be morphed into and - therefore - would allow automatic parsing back and forth. From what you're saying, though, it sounds like IRs don't use a common structure for describing code (I'm guessing because of the semantic misalignment you mention between a wide variety of different paradigms?), so this would only work if I made the map from IR to C# which would be just as complex (or more so) than just regexing my JS into C#. If I've got that right, that's a bummer, but understandable. If I'm wrong, though, happy to learn more!

[gobdovan]

I don't see anything wrong that would disqualify your plan. But if the alternative is regex, and you're writing already in TypeScript, you may take a look at ts-morph [0]. TS has very good compiler APIs and that gets you something much safer than text-based replacement while still staying relatively small for a constrained subset. ts-morph wraps those APIs cleanly.

Btw, JS doesn't even have an official bytecode. The spec is defined at the language semantics level, so each engine/toolchain invents its own internal representation.

[0] https://github.com/dsherret/ts-morph

[catapart]

oh, hell yeah! I hadn't heard of ts-morph. Seems like it would make transpiling to C# much simpler. I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks!