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There is no real distinction, it is all just bad usage of the word. There are only compilers. It may compile to a high level language, but “transpiling” adds zero information to the sentence.

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I just say "compile", too, because it's strictly correct and I like being correct. But "transpiling adds zero information" seems unfair: when you see that word, you at least know the speaker meant "compiling to something other than machine code". No one has ever called gcc a transpiler, so they definitely aren't talking about gcc.

I like the reasoning in the sibling comment:

> So if you want to understand what other people are saying about "compilers" you should keep in mind that the standard definition includes what you are calling "transpilers".

Really, the main disadvantage of saying "transpile" is that it implies you don't know what "compile" means. In a context where that wasn't an issue -- e.g., if I heard it from one of my coworkers, who certainly know what a compiler is -- I would just think they liked the neologism.

I meant the zero information part like you have to state what is the output. So in a typical sentence containing “transpiler”, you would say something like “Nim transpiles to C” - which has the exact same information content as “Nim compiles to C”.

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