←back to thread

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

22 points ninocan | 1 comments | 14 Mar 25 08:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.336s | 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. JimDabell ◴[16 Mar 25 11:52 UTC] No.43378287[source]▶
Unless you’re dealing with a lot of third-parties who can’t port their code, all of this seems like overkill. Just port the workflows to Python instead of trying to transpile them.

If you have an ecosystem to keep compatibility with, I would look at compiling the JavaScript to WASM and running the WASM from Python, or some kind of sandboxing to continue running the JavaScript as-is.