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Bridging Language Barriers: A Comparative Review and Empirical Evaluation of Source-To-Source Transpilers

Authors André Freitas , Tiago Baptista , Pedro Rangel Henriques

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • General and reference → Empirical studies
  • General and reference → Surveys and overviews
  • Software and its engineering → Syntax
  • Software and its engineering → Semantics
  • Software and its engineering → Translator writing systems and compiler generators
  • Software and its engineering → Source code generation
  • Software and its engineering → Parsers
  • Software and its engineering → Interpreters
Keywords
  • Source-to-source translation
  • Code transformation
  • Parsing
  • Lexical analysis
  • Syntax analysis
  • Semantic analysis
  • Transpilation

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Abstract

Source-to-source transpilation plays a pivotal role in modern software engineering by enabling code migration, feature adoption, and cross-language interoperability without sacrificing semantic integrity. The contributions discussed in this paper can be split into two. The first is a comprehensive literature review that aims at defining what transpilers are, traces their historical evolution from early Fortran/COBOL preprocessors to more recent tools like Babel and TypeScript, and examines key parsing methodologies, AST representations, and transformation strategies. The second is an experimental investigation which assesses several popular transpilers - selected by GitHub popularity and unique language-pair capabilities, when applied to an equivalent code snippet designed to sum even numbers and identify the maximum element. The metrics evaluated were the execution time, CPU, memory consumption, output accuracy and usability.

Cite As Get BibTex

André Freitas, Tiago Baptista, and Pedro Rangel Henriques. Bridging Language Barriers: A Comparative Review and Empirical Evaluation of Source-To-Source Transpilers. In 14th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2025). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 135, pp. 11:1-11:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2025.11

Author Details

André Freitas
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre / LASI, Dept. of Informatics, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Tiago Baptista
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre / LASI, Dept. of Informatics, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Pedro Rangel Henriques
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre / LASI, Dept. of Informatics, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Funding

This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Unit Project Scope UID/00319/Centro ALGORITMI.

Supplementary Materials

References

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