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A comment on React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation. Parent comment

Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by recursive on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @11:40AM (#45263757)
All compilers translate one language to another language. Historically compilers targeted lower-abstraction languages than the source language. "Transpiler" is a compiler whose input and output abstraction levels are similar.

The React cinematic universe has a habit of repurposing existing terminology, but they're both transpilers, to the extent that "transpiler" is even a word.

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by patates on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @12:53PM (#45264773)
You are absolutely right! (Here I'm roleplaying an AI chat bot which caught red handed hallucinating).

It appears that I was wrong about the definition of transpilation. It's a specific term for a compiler that compiles from a high-level language to another high-level language, even when those languages are the same with no DSL and even when the logic is optimized.

I stand corrected.

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by hajile on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @01:21PM (#45278698)
In JS land, transpile was used to distinguish something like elm->JS from ES6->ES3. One was the same language with different versions and the other was different source languages.

Yes, all transpilers are compilers, but not all compilers are transpilers.

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