I feel like there's too much of a fetish for self-hosting. There's this pernicious idea that a language isn't a 'real' language until it's self-hosted, but a self-hosted compiler imposes real costs in terms of portability, build integrity, etc.
replyIf I ever write a compiler - God forbid, because language design is exactly the kind of elegance bike-shedding I'll never crawl my way out of - it's going to be a straight-up C89 transpiler, with conditional asm inlines for optional modern features like SIMD. It would compile on anything and run on anything, for free, forever. Why would I ever give that up for some self-hosting social cachet?
If you wrote the C89 outputting transpiler in your own language it would still be just as portable.
replyI'd be dependent on pre-existing binaries that are closely wedded to a particular platform (OS, libc etc), and it over time it would become more and more difficult to attest to build integrity / ensure reproducible builds. (Is the ARM build meant to run an x64 emulator as part of some lengthy historic bootstrapping process?)
reply