[Domenic_S]

I hear that. This is from the readme of a pretty big OSS project:

"a port from Ruby to JS using Opal transcompiler, a Rake build script, a Grunt build, using the Rake build underneath."

I suddenly felt as if I didn't understand computers anymore.

[moron4hire]

How can the people who maintain these projects be satisfied with this experience? I can't imagine ever starting to setup a project like this and saying to myself "this is a good idea, we should keep going this way, and not start over from scratch." Especially in more established projects, stuff that lots of people have already been working on for a while. It's been a serious impediment for my own attempts to get involved with open source software.

[Arnavion]

I just looked up this project Domenic_S mentioned. It says why it does what it does right in the first line of the README:

> This project uses Opal to transcompile Asciidoctor—a modern implementation of AsciiDoc—from Ruby to JavaScript to produce asciidoctor.js, bringing AsciiDoc to the browser!

The whole point is to not rewrite it in JavaScript but to piggyback on the original Ruby implementation and just compile it to JavaScript so it can run in a browser.