> Is it really a transpiler? Why not directly compile to CIL?

The end result of running Otterkit will be an executable or a C# DLL, so compiler would still be the most accurate word to describe it. If it stopped at the translation stage it would be a transpiler.

We're compiling to C# source text so that we can take advantage of the dotnet compiler optimizations. Otterkit calls the dotnet compiler after translating to C#.