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DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2025.11

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

Authors: André Freitas, Tiago Baptista, and Pedro Rangel Henriques

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 135, 14th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2025)

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.

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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)

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@InProceedings{freitas_et_al:OASIcs.SLATE.2025.11,
  author =	{Freitas, Andr\'{e} and Baptista, Tiago and Henriques, Pedro Rangel},
  title =	{{Bridging Language Barriers: A Comparative Review and Empirical Evaluation of Source-To-Source Transpilers}},
  booktitle =	{14th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2025)},
  pages =	{11:1--11:16},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-387-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{135},
  editor =	{Baptista, Jorge and Barateiro, Jos\'{e}},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2025.11},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-236911},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2025.11},
  annote =	{Keywords: Source-to-source translation, Code transformation, Parsing, Lexical analysis, Syntax analysis, Semantic analysis, Transpilation}
}

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

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