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Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

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Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#101

Post by thfuran »

bondarchuk wrote: post #94
jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word we just have to remember that the word exists because at least two parties have found it useful to communicate something between them.

But they may have done so before the meaning shifted or before other, more useful words were coined.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#102

Post by kragen »

jchw wrote: post #60
kragen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary: it reifies people's prejudices and prevents them from seeing reality, often in the service of intentional deception, which for my purposes is the opposite of a useful purpose in communication. There's currently a fad in my country for selling "micellar water" for personal skin cleansing, touted as an innovation. But "micelles" are just the structure that any surfactant forms in water, such as soap, d…

> The term is commonly used to mislead people into believing that a certain piece of software is not a compiler, so that knowledge about compilers does not apply to it. Why would people use a word that has the word "compiler" in it to try to trick people into thinking something is not a compiler? I'm filing this into "issues not caused by the thing that is being complained about".

Apparently nobody has ever said to you, "No, it's not a compiler, it's a transpiler," which makes you a luckier person than I am. People know less than you think.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#103

Post by zem »

jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

in addition to that, some people just seem to have an extreme aversion to neologisms. I remember being surprised by that when ajax (the web technology) first came out and there was a huge "why does this thing which is just need its own name?" faction.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#104

Post by kragen »

oersted wrote: post #64
kragen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC outputs textual GNU assembly language, in which I have written, for example, a web server, a Tetris game, a Forth interpreter, and an interpreter for an object-oriented language with pattern-matching. Perhaps you are under the illusion that I am not a human programmer because this is some kind of superhuman feat, but to me it seems easier than programming in high-level languages. It just takes longer. I think tha…

Of course I'm aware of this, I've written some assembly too, most definitions are leaky. And if GNU assembly had wide adoption among programmers right now and an ecosystem around it, then some people might also call GCC a transpiler (in that specific mode, which is not the default), if they care about the fact that it outputs in a language that they may read or write by hand comfortably. They also called C a high-lev…

I think what happened was that, when writing in assembly language was a common thing to do, programmers had a clearer idea of what a compiler did, so they knew better than to say "transpiler".

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#105

Post by jchw »

kragen wrote: post #102
jchw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The term is commonly used to mislead people into believing that a certain piece of software is not a compiler, so that knowledge about compilers does not apply to it. Why would people use a word that has the word "compiler" in it to try to trick people into thinking something is not a compiler? I'm filing this into "issues not caused by the thing that is being complained about".

Apparently nobody has ever said to you, "No, it's not a compiler , it's a transpiler ," which makes you a luckier person than I am. People know less than you think.

I don't even understand why someone would say that. What's the point in asserting that something isn't a compiler? Not that I doubt that this really happens, but I don't know what saying something "isn't a compiler" is meant to prove. Is it meant to downplay the complexity of a transpiler?

Obviously I believe transpilers are compilers. A cursory Google search shows that the word transpiler is equated to "source-to-source compiler" right away. If it truly wasn't a compiler, didn't have a true frontend and really did a trivial syntax-to-syntax translation, surely it would only be a translator, right? That is my assumption.

But all that put aside for a moment, I do stand by one thing; that's still not really an issue I blame on the existence of the word transpiler. If anything, it feels like it is in spite of the word transpiler, which itself heavily hints at the truth...

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#107

Post by msla »

My punt: Compilers and transpilers are both translators, and the only meaningful difference is whether the output is meant to be easily edited by a human, which is a spectrum more than a hard dividing line. The p2c Pascal to C translator [1] is pretty clearly a transpiler in that the C it outputs is pretty readable, the Stalin Scheme to C translator [2] is more clearly a compiler in that its output, even though it's C, is not human-readable unless you're a very dedicated type of person.

[1] https://github.com/FranklinChen/p2c

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementatio...

So, where does BabelJS sit? Somewhere in between, depending on what language features you used in the input code. Obviously generators require heavy transformations, but other features don't.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#108

Post by downboots »

jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

and a combination lock is a permutation lock

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#109

Post by MrJohz »

kragen wrote: post #55
s20n wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One distinction is that compilers generally translate from a higher-level language to a lower-level language whereas Transpilers target two languages which are very close in the abstraction level. For example a program that translated x86 assembly to RISC-V assembly would be considered a transpiler.

The article we are discussing has "Transpilers Target the Same Level of Abstraction" as "Lie #3", and it clearly explains why that is not true of the programs most commonly described as "transpilers". (Also, I've never heard anyone call a cross-assembler a "transpiler".)

I don't really agree with their argument, though. Pretty much all the features that Babel deals with are syntax sugar, in the sense that if they didn't exist, you could largely emulate them at runtime by writing a bit more code or using a library. The sugar adds a layer of abstraction, but it's a very thin layer, enough that most JavaScript developers could compile (or transpile) the sugar away in their head.

On the other hand, C to Assembly is not such a thin layer of abstraction. Even the parts that seem relatively simple can change massively as soon as an optimisation pass is involved. There is a very clear difference in abstraction layer going on here.

I'll give you that these definitions are fuzzy. Nim uses a source-to-source compiler, and the difference in abstraction between Nim and C certainly feels a lot smaller than the difference between C and Assembly. But the C that Nim generates is, as I understand it, very low-level, and behaves a lot closer to assembly, so maybe in practice the difference in abstraction is greater than it initially seems? I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to make a hard-and-fast set of rules here.

However, it's clear that there is a certain subset of compilers that aim to do source-to-source desugaring transformations, and that this subset of compilers have certain similarities and requirements that mean it makes sense to group them together in some way. And to do that, we have the term "transpiler".

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#110

Post by AlienRobot »

ethmarks wrote: post #63
AlienRobot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting! Splitters make more sense to me since different things should be categorized differently. However, I believe a major problem in modern computing is when the splitter becomes an "abstraction-splitter." For example, take the mouse. The mouse is used to control the mouse cursor, and that's very easy to understand. But we also have other devices that can control the mouse cursor, such as the styl…

Doesn't it make sense to use words that mean what you're using them to mean? By your logic I could use the term "apple" to describe apples, oranges, limes, and all other fruit because they all behave in much the same ways that apples do. But that's silly because there are differences between apples and oranges [citation needed]. If you want to describe both apples and oranges, the word for that is "fruit", not "apple…

The point is that it's simpler to understand what something is by analogy (a touchscreen is a mouse) than by abstraction (a mouse is a pointing device; a touchscreen is also a pointing device), since you need a third, abstracting concept to do the latter.
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