[ChrisFoster]

This is from to the history of how the Julia language was bootstrapped. The fact that Jeff happened to have written his own scheme (femtolisp) as a previous project probably helped :-)

Actually it's not just the parser but most of the compiler frontend which is written in femtolisp. It would be nice to make the frontend more accessible by replacing it with Julia code at some stage. Bootstrapping is tricky though until someone gets separate compilation working.

[snicker7]

Femtolisp is, by-the-way, a brilliant and performant implementation of Scheme. Wish it was used outside of Julia.