I think there is an understanding that the whole situation is less than ideal. I'm proposing a low risk method to transition from the current situation to a he

I think there is an understanding that the whole situation is less than ideal. I'm proposing a low risk method to transition from the current situation to a healthy one over the long term. Having binary compatibility with the old version would be a great safety net while transitioning to another language. The main weakness of the author's plan, as the article explains it, is that they will be dealing with a lot of newly generated code at once (as well as an unknown number of unknowns). The plan would be fine if it was only ~10kloc, but ~500kloc is a very different beast! Come to think about it... It would be wise to have a "Plan B" still written in D, but linked to the binary rather than transpiled. That way if anything goes wrong after deployment, users can temporarily use that rather than revert to Extended Pascal. There probably isn't an easy solution for this problem. But maybe the author has found a silver bullet. I brought up Python because it sounds like SARC is adjacent to scientific computing, and it is likely they'd be able to pick up physics/math/engineering majors that are already familiar with Python. Plus, I bet they'd be able to use some really good Python libraries (possibly replacing some of that 500kloc custom code with open source libraries). The article makes it clear that naval architects (who are not expected to learn C++) are programming, so I doubt high performance computing is required in 100% of the code (at least I hope not). If there are genuine performance issues, tools alone won't save you, you need to hire programmers that know how to optimize (and they'll be fine writing C/C++ libraries with interfaces to Python). I strongly suspect the justification that interpreted languages don't meet performance requirements is more ideological than empirical. Besides, it's likely the existing binary will run faster than its transpiled descendant!