On source-to-source compilers

Abstract

Computer technologies like computer languages and hardware have been involving for past few decades. We have a lot of computer programs which need to maintain and rewrite when releasing new equipment or technology. It is too expensive and unreliable to rewrite the whole code from scratch. Also the spread of portable devices, which usually have multi-core processors, increase the demands on the quality of the developed programs, their effective work in relation to the consumption of resources.  All the above-mentioned reasons complicate the programs and require a large amount of effort from programmers. Moreover, a widely spread of the Internet and web programming with scripting computer languages like JavaScript or Python raised many new problems associated with the quality and reliability of software packages. Source-to-source compilers, also known as transcompiler or transpiler can help to resolve these problems. In this paper, we will describe principles of working for such compilers and consider some of them.