> However, by far the most infuriating (and one I run into frequently in my line of work, hence the anger) is when you are trying to get the language running on a platform for which binary bootstraps do not yet exist.
> Portability matters. If you want your language to be useful and available to as many people as possible, why would you seek to artificially limit the number of platforms it can be built on, just so you can avoid writing the bootstrap in C? I'm sure there is some amount of pride on the part of the language author when their language can bootstrap itself, but it certainly isn't a pragmatic decision.
This problem is easily solved by having a rule that each new version of the compiler must compile in an older version of the compiler. The first few versions are written in C, and once the compiler is self-hosting, new versions of the compiler are compiled on older versions of the compiler. This gives you a path from C to the current version of the language.
In practice, this happens very naturally, because it's how compilers are usually written. Assuming you have version control and the first versions of the compiler are written in C, you usually have the ability to bootstrap up from C. The only thing missing in many projects is documentation and tooling for that process.
> Portability matters. If you want your language to be useful and available to as many people as possible, why would you seek to artificially limit the number of platforms it can be built on, just so you can avoid writing the bootstrap in C? I'm sure there is some amount of pride on the part of the language author when their language can bootstrap itself, but it certainly isn't a pragmatic decision.
This problem is easily solved by having a rule that each new version of the compiler must compile in an older version of the compiler. The first few versions are written in C, and once the compiler is self-hosting, new versions of the compiler are compiled on older versions of the compiler. This gives you a path from C to the current version of the language.
In practice, this happens very naturally, because it's how compilers are usually written. Assuming you have version control and the first versions of the compiler are written in C, you usually have the ability to bootstrap up from C. The only thing missing in many projects is documentation and tooling for that process.