If it was transpiled there would be what GNU calls a "preferred form" of the linker source in which it wasn't written in Rust.
This is true for - as an example - the WUFFS GIF decoder. You can get C which decodes GIFs and was transpiled from WUFFS, but that's awful code and nobody wants to modify that code, whereas the WUFFS source code for the decoder is fine.
When we look at rui314's changes to mold today after 3.0 release, they just modify the mold source code in Rust, as you'd expect if this was in fact now written in Rust.
> If it was transpiled there would be what GNU calls a "preferred form" of the linker source in which it wasn't written in Rust.
No, that's only sometimes true. If you like the transpiled version and start editing it directly then that's the new preferred form, but it was still a transpile to get from one language to the other.
