17 points gavinhoward 2 days ago 2 comments

nanolith 7 hours ago | parent

This is why I've made it a point with my compilers to always include a minimum subset bootstrap compiler written in C, which can compile the compiler to C via transpilation. The only dependencies are a C compiler toolchain and a POSIX compatible libc.

This does make the compiler slightly more annoying to extend, but that makes bootstrapping support for a new system easier. User experience is important.

lioeters 5 hours ago | parent

Related:

Bootstrapping Specific Languages: Go, Rust, Java, C#, Scala, Lisp and Scheme, FORTH, Bison, Ada and SPARK, Pascal and Nim.. https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_Specif...

Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why - https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473868#49477197 (50 days ago, 60 comments)