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Comment by carterza | Hacker News Reader

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carterza·

Compiles... compiles.

Edit -

Sorry - that was rude. I should have elaborated.

Transpiling is a specific type of compilation that involves two languages with a similar level of abstraction.

Compilation involves languages with different levels of abstraction.

Nim offers a much higher-level abstraction than C, thus you could consider the process of converting Nim to C, a compilation process rather than a transpilation process.

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This comes up everytime i post about this and most people agree with me that transpile means convert to a different source language. It is definitely a common use, but I realize it is a gray area.

Edit: Compiling def isn't wrong, but Transpiling is more descriptive to me as it indicates you're not going to assembly or machine language or something like that.

Compiling is the correct terminology here. Nim transpiles to JavaScript, but it compiles to C and C++. You don't say that Rust transpiles to LLVM IR, do you?

I would say compiles is a more general form of transpiles. Transpiling meaning it compiles into a higher level form i.e. c, C++, JavaScript, and compile meaning it compiles into a more lower level form i.e assembly, bytecode, etc?

That's just how I look at it anyway.

Mad respect for you Dom, but why would going from Nim -> JS be Transpiling and Nim-> C++ be compiling? Both go from a high level Lang to another high level Lang.

I don't consider C/C++ high-level.

I would normally agree with you, but that seems subjective.

It is indeed a little subjective and changes with time. This Wikipedia article explains it fairly well I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_languag...

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