Transpiling is source to source compiling, translating from one language to another, where both languages are at a similar level of abstraction.
For the background on why we'd want to do this, see my previous blog post on suneido.js
Transpiling is still compiling, and unless the translation is trivial, you need to parse the source language. I didn't want to write another Suneido parser, especially since I already had one in C++ in cSuneido and another in Java in jSuneido. cSuneido emits byte code as it parses, making it fast, but not very reusable. But jSuneido's parser builds an abstract syntax tree (AST) which is exactly what I needed.
One option would have been to write the transpiler in Java, as part of jSuneido. But I decided to write it in Suneido, for easier development and so it would be more accessible to Suneido programmers.
I added an AstParse function to jSuneido which takes a source string and returns an AST. Instead of converting the entire AST to Suneido objects I wrapped the internal AST and converted it lazily. [aside - I'm also hoping that we can use this in the IDE, e.g. for refactoring tools]
The big issue is deciding how to map from the Suneido language to JavaScript. Some things are easy, for example Suneido strings could be JavaScript strings. But other Suneido data types don't map directly. Even numbers are different since Suneido uses decimal floating point (for accurate business math) whereas JavaScript has binary floating point. Operations also differ so they have to be implemented as calls to a runtime support library. Suneido is also both more strict and more flexible with function arguments so that also requires runtime support.
So far I have statement and expression translation almost complete, and minimal versions of the runtime support routines (see: https://github.com/apmckinlay/suneido.js)
Here's a screenshot from a basic web page (running from a jSuneido server) that demonstrates the translation:
For the background on why we'd want to do this, see my previous blog post on suneido.js
Transpiling is still compiling, and unless the translation is trivial, you need to parse the source language. I didn't want to write another Suneido parser, especially since I already had one in C++ in cSuneido and another in Java in jSuneido. cSuneido emits byte code as it parses, making it fast, but not very reusable. But jSuneido's parser builds an abstract syntax tree (AST) which is exactly what I needed.
One option would have been to write the transpiler in Java, as part of jSuneido. But I decided to write it in Suneido, for easier development and so it would be more accessible to Suneido programmers.
I added an AstParse function to jSuneido which takes a source string and returns an AST. Instead of converting the entire AST to Suneido objects I wrapped the internal AST and converted it lazily. [aside - I'm also hoping that we can use this in the IDE, e.g. for refactoring tools]
The big issue is deciding how to map from the Suneido language to JavaScript. Some things are easy, for example Suneido strings could be JavaScript strings. But other Suneido data types don't map directly. Even numbers are different since Suneido uses decimal floating point (for accurate business math) whereas JavaScript has binary floating point. Operations also differ so they have to be implemented as calls to a runtime support library. Suneido is also both more strict and more flexible with function arguments so that also requires runtime support.
So far I have statement and expression translation almost complete, and minimal versions of the runtime support routines (see: https://github.com/apmckinlay/suneido.js)
Here's a screenshot from a basic web page (running from a jSuneido server) that demonstrates the translation:
