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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: 0.673s | 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. dvh ◴[16 Mar 25 10:21 UTC] No.43377954[source]▶
I once needed to convert 2000 line excel formula to PHP but PHP linters sucks and are generally not helpful so I converted it to JS first and then I just added $ signs in front of variable names, few minor tweaks and it worked. It was easier than to go directly to PHP.
replies(1): >>43378017 #
2. harvey9 ◴[16 Mar 25 10:38 UTC] No.43378017[source]▶
Do you literally mean Excel formula and not VBA? That's mind-blowing.
replies(1): >>43378313 #
3. anonzzzies ◴[16 Mar 25 11:57 UTC] No.43378313[source]▶
Lot of insurers etc do their work in Excel, i've seen 10000s of 'lines' of formulas in 1000s of sheets needing to be translated into Java. Most of them try, every few years, one of those 'why can't we just run Excel on the backend?' with one of those tools, commercial or not, spend a bunch of money, find it's a crap idea (scalability, maintenance etc) and then port it to a 'real language'.