Didn't Rust itself used to have a compiler written in a different language? I mean, obviously it would've had to at some point but I think I remember reading about them abandoning it once they didn't need it. Why not use that?

[–] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can technically do it, but it's a convoluted path. The article talks about it. Basically to bootstrap that way you need to go through a lot of versions of rust, compile rust 0.7 in ocaml, compile ocaml in scheme, and compile scheme in C using gcc. For gcc you need to compile a chain of versions back to when it was written in C instead of C++, plus the whole TinyCC bootstrapping path.

edit: had listed scala instead of ocaml

[–] Giooschi@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

compile rust 0.7 in scala

Not sure if there was another rewrite, but AFAIK (and the article agrees with me) rustc was originally written in Ocaml

[–] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, I wrote the wrong language. I tend to lump those together in my head as 'big multi-paradigm languages I haven't bothered to learn yet.'