News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler for .NET. Parent comment

Re:Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler... by KTSnowy on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @11:17AM (#34414361)
> 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#.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler... by Rochus on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @11:45AM (#34414791)
> advantage of the dotnet compiler optimizations

That's mostly constant folding and a bit of peephole optimization; the CLI JIT or AOT compilers do most optimizations on the CIL level.

> so compiler would still be the most accurate word to describe it

Well, you do a source-to-source translation from Cobol to C#. The terminology is fuzzy, but usually we call it a transpiler if the output is yet another high-level programming language. But who cares.

[ Parent | on HN ]