Re: self-hosting, was Writing A Plain English Compiler

Richard Hable <portempa@aon.at> writes:
>On 11/09/14 02:16, BartC wrote:
>
>> Self-hosting (implementing a language in itself) is a nice touch, but
>> I don't think it's that important, perhaps because people are
>> realising that the best language to implement a compiler in, is not
>> necessarily the language that is being compiled. Unless of course you
>> are trying to use a single language for everything.)
>
>I think, the main advantage of self-hosting is that it can be used as
>one big unit test: you can compile the compiler with itself, use the
>resulting compiler to compile itself again, and check if the result is
>exactly the same.


Yes, having additional testing for your compiler is one advantage
(although I would not call it a unit test).


Another reason to self-host a compiler is the signal it sends: If you
claim that your language is general-purpose, and you write the
compiler for it in a different language, you are obviously not very
convinced of the capabilities of your language, so why should anybody
else use it?


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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