Re: Newbie question: What is the importance for a compiler to be able to compile itself?

Marco van de Voort <marcov@snail.stack.nl>
Tue, 19 May 2009 13:26:32 +0000 (UTC)

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From: Marco van de Voort <marcov@snail.stack.nl>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 13:26:32 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Stack Usenet News Service
References: 09-05-080
Keywords: practice
Posted-Date: 19 May 2009 14:00:09 EDT

On 2009-05-19, armencho@gmail.com <armencho@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the importance with a compiler that is able to compile itself?
> As far as I can see from my limited wisdom, it is not a requirement
> and perhaps does not even prove anything substantial about the
> compiler?


Mostly an extra testsuite. Both from a "keep it working" perspective, as
from an usage perspective. It is a pretty serious codebase in that
particular exact dialect of the langauge, and early on often the largest.


Also if the runtime lib is written in itself, it is also a kind of user
testing by particularly skilled users. Many lowlevel extensions in our
compiler were added because the runtime lib implementation benefited from
it.


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