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Comment by Shamanmuni | Hacker News Reader

I know it's crazy difficult to do it, that's why I was talking about dreams.

But maybe a set of guidelines about translatable C code plus a translator which is good enough for a variety of cases would make refactoring the resulting code such a manageable task that many projects could consider switching to Go directly.

You are technically correct in that compile already implicates a translation, but we usually use that term refering to a translation into a lower level language and not another language at the same level. You can say transpiler or source-to-source compiler for those cases and I think it's clearer and more accurate for the reader.

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> ... but we usually use that term refering to a translation into a lower level language and not another language at the same level.

Rust is not lower-level than C++ and neither is Go lower-level than C.

Exactly. Hence "transpiler".

What part of his definition didn't you understand? He said a transpiler trasnlates from a higher-level language to a lower-level language. We are talking about translating from C -> Go and C++ -> Rust both of which are in the opposite direction (i.e., low -> high).

> He said a transpiler trasnlates from a higher-level language to a lower-level language

No, he said a compiler translates from a higher-level language to a lower-level language:

"You are technically correct in that compile already implicates a translation, but we usually use that term [= compile] refering to a translation into a lower level language"

Ahh, my bad.

This should not have been down-voted. We are talking about translation from C -> Go and C++ -> Rust (which are both in the opposite direction of the definition given for 'transpiling').

> You are technically correct in that compile already implicates a translation, but we usually use that term [ie compile] refering to a translation into a lower level language and not another language at the same level.

The way I understood what he wrote, he was making the same point as you. Presumably the people downvoting you had a similar interpretation of what he wrote.

I agree that your comment added value to the discussion, and gave a counter-vote.

However, arguably the term could make more sense there, if we ignore the earlier definition and instead assume "trans" is short for "transcendent", as in "climbing to a higher level".

If we then simplify that to "compile from one language to another of roughly equal or higher level", it becomes a useful word to indicate a specific subset of ways one can do compilation.

Of course, I'm completely pulling this out of my ass and I might piss off actual CompSci people who use very specific and strict definitions in their papers (kind of like how some get annoyed with the procedure/function mixup), so take this with a grain of salt.

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