[belmarca]

There is a lot of confusion around those words. I personally make a distinction between a "compiler" and a "transpiler".

A compiler preserves the semantics - if you compile Scheme to C, you get a real Scheme program in C, with full semantics.

A transpiler does not have to guarantee that. It is much easier to transpile Python to JavaScript than it is to truly compile Python to JavaScript. A transpiler can tolerate some amount of leakage between worlds (think 'arguments' as a variable name in Python vs JS).

It really depends on your needs. Sometimes a transpiler is okay, sometimes totally inadequate.