Are transpiling techniques different than compiling techniques?

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


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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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