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Summary
Any programmer who has dealt with a website for any length of time knows that writing JavaScript isn’t always the most enjoyable. Wouldn’t you rather write that code in Python and just have it work on your website? In this episode we learn about Transcrypt with its creator Jacques de Hooge. Transcrypt is a Python to JavaScript transpiler that embraces the JavaScript ecosystem while letting you use the familiar syntax of Python for writing your logic, rather than trying to shoehorn a Python runtime into your browser.
Brief Introduction
- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
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- Your host today is Tobias Macey
- Today I am interviewing Jacques de Hooge about his work on the Transcrypt Project
Interview with Jacques de Hooge
- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python? – Tobias
- What is Transcrypt and what inspired you to create it? – Tobias
- As you mention in the documentation, there are a number of projects that attempt to shoehorn Python into the browser. What makes Transcrypt different? – Tobias
- I like that you decided to embrace the web environment by calling into JavaScript libraries. What are some of the challenges that you encountered while creating that functionality? – Tobias
- How is the transpilation performed and what are some of the methods that you used to get the build size as small as it is? – Tobias
- Given the nature of JavaScripts prototypical inheritance and differences in class semantics, I imagine that adding support for multiple inheritance and reflecting the structure of Python classes must have been challenging. Can you describe that process and how you arrived at your current solution? – Tobias
- Which aspects of the language were most difficult to translate to JavaScript? – Tobias
- Is Transcrypt complete and stable enough to be used in production? – Tobias
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The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
