So many programming languages, or their implementations are written in some other language. Usually C or C++.
Worse the dev. environment often is written in a completely unrelated language.
Why is that? And what can be done about it... Yes at some point we have to give in into the status quo of device drivers, operating systems or UI libraries. But most implementations don't even go that far which makes them far less useful that they could be.
Most languages aren't specialized for making interpreters or compilers, so there's no fucking point in making them self-hosting. Far too many toy languages are self-hosted as it is, usually because the compiler is the only non-trivial program its creator will ever write.
C is widely-supported, fast, has tools like Lex and YACC made for it, and doesn't require some stupid bootstrap process just to use your toy language.
Name:
Anonymous2011-11-03 19:04
>>2
That's a chicken and the egg problem, many languages could be regarded as something more serious if they had their own code generators.
>>3
No. Serious languages are made for a purpose. When you have a purpose, you have better things to do than rewriting a working compiler to an obscure language for no benefit.
Self hosting is a good idea and should be done for every programming language, as the compiler pretty much becomes the test suite for the whole thing. Otherwise the language is so niche it should just be implemented as a Lisp macro. >>2
C has it easy being bootstrapped for you in most unix-like distros.
Name:
Anonymous2011-11-03 23:13
>>2 Far too many toy languages are self-hosted as it is
pypy is not a ``toy language'', fagburst
>>6
So a binary of the compiler comes along with the language. That doesn't make it any more different.
I don't know a single serious language which doesn't bootstrap itself, except some interpreted ones which just don't have a compiler.