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Possible Duplicates:
implementing a compiler in “itself”
Bootstrapping a language
How can you write a compiler in the same language as the language you're writing that compiler for? Isn't that sort of recursive?
Edit: This may be deleted, but otherwise... :
How to bootstrap:
Why to bootstrap:
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If the compiler is written in the same language as the one it's compiling, the compiler is called self-hosting. If a language is new, then no compiler exists for it already, which means that its first compiler cannot be self-hosting (otherwise, how would that first compiler be compiled?).
Show activity on this post. A compiler could probably be written in any language. In its most basic form, a compiler merely converts code from one language to another.
compiler, computer software that translates (compiles) source code written in a high-level language (e.g., C++) into a set of machine-language instructions that can be understood by a digital computer's CPU. Compilers are very large programs, with error-checking and other abilities.
Yes it's called Bootstrapping. In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler (or assembler) in the target programming language which it is intended to compile. Applying this technique leads to a self-hosting compiler.
Generally the first version of the compiler is written in a different language, and then each subsequent version is written in that language and compiled with the older version. Once you've compiled version x with version x-1, you can use the newly built version x to recompile itself, taking advantage of any new optimizations that version introduces; GCC does its releases that way
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It is. You usually need a bootstrap version of the language either compiled or interpreted from another language.
And to bend your mind a little more, years ago I read the history of a Pascal compiler written as a grad student project. It written in Pascal and compiled with the system's built-in Pascal compiler. Eventually, it was good enough to replace the system's built-in Pascal compiler. Unfortunately, they found a bug in code generation, but the fix for the code generator triggered the bug in the compiler, generating a bad compiler. To fix it required hand-patching the binaries from the installed compiler to then apply the patch to the source to replace itself.
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