[throwaway894345]

I don't think it was "limited developer resources" so much as a desire to preserve blazing-fast compile times. The very rough rule-of-thumb that I've heard is that optimizations must pay for themselves (a compiler which is itself compiled with the given optimization must not be slower than the previous version).

[igouy]

"He used the compiler's self-compilation speed as a measure of the compiler's quality. Considering that Wirth's compilers were written in the languages they compiled, and that compilers are substantial and non-trivial pieces of software in their own right, this introduced a highly practical benchmarks that directly contested a compiler's complexity against its performance."

p44 "Oberon — The Overlooked Jewel" Michael Franz, in "The School of Niklaus Wirth".

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_School_of_Niklaus_W...