My punt: Compilers and transpilers are both translators, and the only meaningful difference is whether the output is meant to be easily edited by a human, which

My punt: Compilers and transpilers are both translators, and the only meaningful difference is whether the output is meant to be easily edited by a human, which is a spectrum more than a hard dividing line. The p2c Pascal to C translator [1] is pretty clearly a transpiler in that the C it outputs is pretty readable, the Stalin Scheme to C translator [2] is more clearly a compiler in that its output, even though it's C, is not human-readable unless you're a very dedicated type of person. [1] https://github.com/FranklinChen/p2c https://github.com/FranklinChen/p2c [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementatio... So, where does BabelJS sit? Somewhere in between, depending on what language features you used in the input code. Obviously generators require heavy transformations, but other features don't.