Preprocessors and Transpilers

This chapter returns us from our detour into IDEs back to the quest of generating output from our source program that can run. There are many ways to produce executable output from a programming language, and rather than pick just one in order to adhere to a rigid sequential narrative, this and the next couple chapters are a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book that explores three ways of producing an executable: this chapter discusses translation to another high-level language, while Chapter 12 presents translation to a lower-level software instruction set called a bytecode machine, and Chapter 13 illustrates translation to native code that runs on the hardware’s instruction set.

The ordering of these three chapters is intentional. The code generation for this chapter is easier to implement but offers slower performance than the strategy demonstrated in Chapter 12, which is easier but slower than the strategy of Chapter 13. You may want...