Chapter 1

1. It is much easier to generate C code than to generate machine code, but the resulting code may be larger or slower than native code, and a transpiler depends on an underlying compiler that may be a bit of a moving target.
2. Lexical, syntax, and semantic analysis, followed by intermediate and final code generation.
3. Classic pain points include input/output being overly difficult, especially on new kinds of hardware; concurrency; and making a program run across many different operating systems and CPUs. One feature that languages have used to simplify input/output has been to reduce the problem of communicating with new hardware via a set of strings in human-readable formats, for example, to play music or read touch input. Concurrency has been simplified in languages with built-in threads and monitors. Portability has been simplified in languages that provide their own high-level virtual machine implementation.
4. This depends on your application domain of interest...