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Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques?

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Hi Folks,

Today I learned a new word: transpiling

I looked it up and learned that it is converting one source code to another.
See below.

"Neat!" I thought. "I am converting a military air navigation data format to a
civilian air navigation data format, which is a kind of transpiling, I think.
I wonder if there are techniques specific to transpiling?

Is there a book or tutorial on how to build a transpiler? Are there techniques
unique to transpilers?

/Roger

-----------------------------------------------

Compiler: is an umbrella term to describe a program that takes source code
written in one language and produce a (or many) output file in some other
language. In practice we mostly use this term to describe a compiler such as
gcc which takes in C code as input and produces a binary executable (machine
code) as output.

Transpilers are also known as source-to-source compilers. So in essence they
are a subset of compilers which take in a source code file and convert it to
another source code file in some other language or a different version of the
same language. The ouput is generally understandable by a human. This output
still has to go through a compiler or interpreter to be able to run on the
machine.

Some examples of transpilers:
1.   Emscripten<https://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/>: Transpiles C/C++
to JavaScript
2.   Babel<https://babeljs.io/>: Transpiles ES6+ code to ES5 (ES6 and ES5 are
different versions or generations of the JavaScript language)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44931479/compiling-vs-transpiling

[Back in the day, the term was "sift", from a translator from Fortran
II to Fortran IV written in 1962. In the late 1960s IBM had a Fortran
to PL/I translator which worked (I used it) but generated ugly code
due to all the places where the semantics of PL/I were almost but not
quite the same as similar looking Fortran constructs:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/fortran/GC33-2002-2_FORTRAN_To_PL1_Translator_Jan73.pdf

I think you will find two approaches.  There's the half-hearted one in which
it translates contstructs into corresponding ones and hopes the differences
don't matter, and the full one that is a real compiler with all of the
usual analyses and a code generator that happens to generate another high
level language.  The f2c Fortran to C translator is an example

https://www.netlib.org/f2c/f2c.pdf

-John]

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Thread

Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2021-10-11 13:26 +0000
  Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Kartik Agaram <ak@akkartik.com> - 2021-10-11 11:23 -0700
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-10-12 20:05 +0200
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2021-10-16 17:16 +0000
      Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> - 2021-10-16 20:22 +0000
      Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-10-16 23:55 +0200
        Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-10-17 07:02 +0200
          Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-10-17 15:01 -0700
  Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? "Detlef Meyer-Eltz" <Meyer-Eltz@t-online.de> - 2021-10-12 11:34 +0200
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? jan van katwijk <j.vankatwijk@gmail.com> - 2021-10-12 17:59 +0200
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-10-12 20:19 +0200
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2021-10-14 00:33 +0300
    Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2021-10-16 17:26 +0000
      Re: Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-10-17 08:37 -0700

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