Because I believe language stability is proportional to number of users.
Would I use a new transpiler for a toy personal project? Absolutely! Would I use it for an enterprise codebase that's going to live 10-15 years? No way!
If you accept that every mapping is less than perfect (e.g. source -> assembly, vm -> underlying hardware, transpiler source -> target), then it follows that each additional mapping increases impedance.
And impedance bugs are always of the "tear apart and understand the entire plumbing, then fix bug / add necessary feature."
When I'm on a deadline, I'm not going near that sort of risk.
I see "transpilers" as being on a continuum ranging from IDE collapse comments and collapse blocks at one end, to full code generation syntax macros at the other end. There's a sweet spot in the middle where the productivity gains from terser code outweigh the impedance risk.
Would I use a new transpiler for a toy personal project? Absolutely! Would I use it for an enterprise codebase that's going to live 10-15 years? No way!
If you accept that every mapping is less than perfect (e.g. source -> assembly, vm -> underlying hardware, transpiler source -> target), then it follows that each additional mapping increases impedance.
And impedance bugs are always of the "tear apart and understand the entire plumbing, then fix bug / add necessary feature."
When I'm on a deadline, I'm not going near that sort of risk.