nemesis wrote:
> Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>> The first C compiler was writen and compiled in C.
> 
> If it was the first, that means there was no C compiler, so the writers had to
> hand compile the compiler by direct translating it to assembly  and then using
> that binary to compile it again.  That should've been quite a straightforward
> task, as C is very close to assembly and it was just a first unoptimized
> version anyway.
> 
> not so sure about the feasibility of having to hand compile a huge Haskell
> codebase like GHC... *gasp*...

Well that's easy - it wasn't so huge back then! ;-)

(I suspect what they probably did is implement a simple interpretter in 
C, and run the first-pass GHC sources through that to compile itself. I 
don't actually *know* of course...)

Post a reply to this message