alt Hacker News> You can argue whether we need the term "transpiler," but a source-to-source compiler is a compiler.
That's true today, but compiling was historically was defined as getting source code (human readable) to bytecode (machine runnable without an interpreter).
Some people didn't like that definition, and consequently the waters have been murkied. Just like with eg crypto. Or real time.
How historical? Compilers that have translated from a source language into C and have left the C-to-bytecode translation to another compiler have been around for a long time, as have compilers that translated from a source language to Assembly