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This post is oddly adamant about a point that it makes with (what it acknowledges to be) very weak evidence. If the Typescript compiler is really a compiler, th

This post is oddly adamant about a point that it makes with (what it acknowledges to be) very weak evidence. If the Typescript compiler is really a compiler, then JSweet is surely also a compiler? Both go from a stricter type system to a laxer one, and neither is really reversible. What really comes through is that the author seems to think that transpiler status is somehow lesser, and the whole nitpicking about compilers/transpilers is just an attempt to make sure Nim lands squarely on the compiler side. Maybe the conclusion that should be reached is the one the author is hinting towards at the end - which is that transpiler and compiler don't really have a strong distinction, and their usage is muddied enough that saying whether something is "actually" a transpiler or a compiler is mostly pointless. (And then there would be less worry that people "mistakenly" call Nim a transpiler, eh?)

PMunch 5y ago
Author here, I specifically tried to pick projects which self-identified as transpilers in order to not accidentally call a project I didn't know enough about a transpiler incorrectly. I don't in any way think that a transpiler is lesser, but a lot of the questions we've gotten about it in the Nim community has been phrased in a way which makes be believe that some people do. Hence why the article is written with that counter-stance. The conclusion is definitely that these are loose terms that can apply to many different things. But some of the usages are more useful as differentiating terms than others. The very broad definitions of transpilers ends up making most if not all compilers into transpilers which isn't terribly useful, and the in-between ones I've found are so under-defined that the term ends up not meaning anything at all. This was merely my attempt at reaching a definition of transpiler that is not only a useful distinction from a compiler, but also serves as a more concrete term.
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PMunch 5y ago

Author here, I specifically tried to pick projects which self-identified as transpilers in order to not accidentally call a project I didn't know enough about a transpiler incorrectly. I don't in any way think that a transpiler is lesser, but a lot of the questions we've gotten about it in the Nim community has been phrased in a way which makes be believe that some people do. Hence why the article is written with that counter-stance. The conclusion is definitely that these are loose terms that can apply to many different things. But some of the usages are more useful as differentiating terms than others. The very broad definitions of transpilers ends up making most if not all compilers into transpilers which isn't terribly useful, and the in-between ones I've found are so under-defined that the term ends up not meaning anything at all. This was merely my attempt at reaching a definition of transpiler that is not only a useful distinction from a compiler, but also serves as a more concrete term.

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