this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C? (notgull.net)
submitted 2 months ago by thomask@lemmy.sdf.org to c/rust@programming.dev
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[–] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 2 months ago

The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.