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by onei 1900 days ago
The very first B compiler was written in BCPL by Ken Thompson. B later became self-hosting, i.e. the BCPL compiler compiled the B compiler, but this had another set of challenges due to the extreme memory constraints. It was an iterative process where a new feature was added such that it pushed the memory limit and then the compiler was rewritten to use the new feature to bring the memory usage down.

C was heavily inspired by B and I suspect written in B aswell. Alternatively, BCPL was extremely portable as it compiled to OCode (what we'd recognise today as bytecode) so that might have been another option. The assignment operators of =+ are straight from B and later changed to += due to Dennis Ritchie's personal taste.
2 comments
aap_ 1900 days ago
The first B compiler was actually written in TMG, and once it was bootstrapped that way in B itself. BCPL was only the inspiration for the language.
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sramsay 1900 days ago
Wow, TMG was a new one for me. From the Wiki article on it:

"Douglas McIlroy ported TMG to an early version of Unix. According to Ken Thompson, McIlroy wrote TMG in TMG on a piece of paper and "decided to give his piece of paper his piece of paper," hand-compiling assembly language that he entered and assembled on Thompson's Unix system running on PDP-7."

We are not worthy, friends. We are not worthy.

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kragen 1900 days ago
I did pretty much the same thing with https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md, although admittedly hand-compiling to JS was noticeably less work than hand-compiling to assembly language would have taken. My friend Dave did something similar with Val Schorre's META-II: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2724586 (missing the figures for some reason, so see:) doi:10.1145/2697401
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deterministic 1898 days ago
Ehh...I taught myself machine code programming when I was 11. Hand translating programs I wrote in Assembler on paper to byte code and typing it in byte by byte. And I am no programming God. So it might be less hard than you think :)
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ForOldHack 1899 days ago
We are merely observing the footsteps of compiler gods.
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haecceity 1900 days ago
How was gcc bootstrapped?
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Koshkin 1900 days ago
Wikipedia has a relevant tidbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Histor...

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