Anna Herlihy — Transpile anything to everything!

Compass, the UI for MongoDB, is an Electron app that allows developers to visually develop aggregations and queries for their database. Right now it accepts these queries in the MongoDB Shell syntax, a JavaScript-based query language. However, developers use a wide range of programming languages in their apps, and constant context switching between languages can be painful. To cure this pain, we wanted to allow users to export the queries they built-in Compass into whatever programming language they wanted. Even better, we wanted to also allow users to write their favorite language directly into Compass. To achieve these goals, we needed a way to translate query syntax in any programming language into query syntax in any other language, so we needed to write a multi-language-input to multi-language-output transpiler! This talk will go through the technical design of the anything-to-anything pluggable transpiler and teach attendees how they can add their own favorite language to Compass. Anna