On the other hand, we have terms like "C compiler", "linker", "assembler", and many others, which are kinds of compilers. You can't just assert that a distinction is arbitrary, you need to say why you think this distinction is arbitrary and pointless.
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Replying to @wycats @ManishEarth
Right, I agree with that. It's just that "targets JS" includes Babel, Clojurescript, some LLVM backends, and some GHC backends, but not other LLVM backends or GHC backends or Clojure.
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Replying to @samth @ManishEarth
"Targets a version of JavaScript that is not the most modern but exists on the bulk of my target computers" is roughly what the term is trying to convey. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's English. But it's not very similar to Janpiler.
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Replying to @wycats @ManishEarth
Sure, and "can target an ARM processor that's not really old" is a similarly useful thing to know but we don't call GCC and armpiler.
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Replying to @samth @ManishEarth
It doesn't make sense to call GCC an armpiler because it has other purposes. In any event, I think it's silly to single out "transpiler" for being a pointless distinction, and I think it happens because of "those JS kids" feelings.
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Replying to @wycats @ManishEarth
As someone who has been on the "down with the T word" for a decade now, it has never been about that, but in fact the opposite. Also, if that's true for GCC, then what's different about emcc, which is mostly just clang these days?
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I’m hesitant to weigh in but for me “transpiler” has always meant “a compiler that transforms a high-level language to high-level language”, inheriting all the fuzziness in the term “high-level language”
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is GHC a transpiler then? I mean, it compiles down to (a variant of) C
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Replying to @strega_nil @samth and
C isn’t high-level (and C-- less so), so no
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C is absolutely a high level language
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Hence why I said “inheriting all the fuzziness in the term ‘high-level language’”.
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