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ASK HN: How to engineer a JavaScript to Python migration?

22 points ninocan | 3 comments | 14 Mar 25 08:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.679s | source

Context: I was tasked with migrating a legacy workflow system (Broadcom CA Workflow Automation) to Airflow.

There are some jobs that contain rather simple JavaScript snippets, and I was trying to design a first prototype that simply takes the JS parts and runs them in a transpiler.

In this respect, I found a couple of packages that could be leveraged: - js2py: https://github.com/PiotrDabkowski/Js2Py - mini-racer: https://github.com/bpcreech/PyMiniRacer Yet, both seem to be abandoned packages that might not be suitable for usage in production.

Therefore, I was thinking about parsing and translating Javascript's abstract syntax trees to Python. Whereas a colleague suggested I bring up an LLM pipeline.

How much of an overkill that might be? Has anyone else ever dealt with a JavaScript-to-Python migration and could share heads-ups on strategies or pitfalls to avoid?

1. gostsamo ◴[14 Mar 25 08:30 UTC] No.43360622[source]▶
Hi, is this a monolith or a series of scripts? if the latter, isolate each script enough that it could be ran with python and then do it for all the scripts. if it is a monolith, consider splitting it and working on the pieces one by one.

an old package on prod is not an issue if it is isolated and you have a plan for change, so if you have to transpile, do it and then work from the bottom.

replies(1): >>43360647 #
2. ninocan ◴[14 Mar 25 08:36 UTC] No.43360647[source]▶
It's a bunch of scripts, a few lines long. But again, I haven't seen the totality of them and there might be edge cases with longer scripts.

Thanks for your hint!

replies(1): >>43360690 #
3. gostsamo ◴[14 Mar 25 08:47 UTC] No.43360690[source]▶
if we are talking small scripts, just rewrite in python and make sure that they are called with the right interpreter. use ai if you are not acquainted with the language. ask your managers if they might want to use another language which could be compiled and save on compute time. though not popular, nim is python like, and should do the job admirably.