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I get a little confused when people say they "compile" x scripting language into y scripting language.
by psykovsky 11y ago
I get a little confused when people say they "compile" x scripting language into y scripting language.
- mrgoldenbrown 11y agoAre you trying to be snarky or are you actually confused? Check out the wikipedia article on Transpilers for info on source to source compilers.
- psykovsky 11y agoI know. Not trying to be snarky at all. Why don't people call stuff by it's names??? Transpiling, not compiling. Maybe it looks like I'm nitpicking... If it got across like that, sorry. Not my intention at all.
- nv-vn 11y agoWhat would you call it other than "compiling"?
- psykovsky 11y agoTranspiling, as said above. Or maybe transpiling is compiling. I think I'll get out of it more confused than going in.
- nv-vn 11y agoI like to view transpiling as a specialization of compiling. Even if you try to make the distinction between high-level input -> low-level output, in the end it feels like the language matters much less than how the generated code is designed. Most "transpilers" end up using the bare minimum number of features for the target language and staying constrained to a pretty low-level part of that language. For example, languages that transpile to JavaScript tend to target asm.js, which really doesn't look anything like the JavaScript that real people write. Getting bogged down in naming differences when the overall process is pretty much identical is just ignoring the big picture in my mind.