Comment by hgoel
3 hours ago
What's low quality about a working transpile? Missing out on engine details/optimizations is a shame, but if someone cares about that they can do that themselves, it doesn't make the transpile itself low quality.
3 hours ago
What's low quality about a working transpile? Missing out on engine details/optimizations is a shame, but if someone cares about that they can do that themselves, it doesn't make the transpile itself low quality.
Gonna have to heavily erm-akshully this.
Decomps or decompilation is about recovering source code that can bit for bit recover the same binary asset. This gives you back the source code from just the binaries. This requires the same toolchains, sdks, etc.
Recomps or recompilations basically inline and unroll say a PPC interpreter back into HLL code. This gets you something that modern toolchains can work with, while you replace all the IO layers so you can update the graphics, controller and networking stacks.
Neither of these are transpilation, which normally refers to a source to source compiler that translate the codes laterally in the same semantic strata.
What most folks are doing are recomps and there are existing SDKs for this (pre-ai) but more and more tooling is becoming available to the point at which I think there will be an agentic harness that runs the game under and emulator for realtime delta debugging and visual diffing.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law
I had a feeling that transpilation was maybe somehow different from decomp/recomp but convinced myself they were close enough.
Thanks for the interesting "erm-akshully" on the distinction!