[vgel]

I'm not sure, haven't looked at the codebases of old compilers in a long time. Definitely a lot of the language is pretty amenable to it, especially if you have unstructured jumps for e.g. the for advancement statement. I had a distinct feeling while writing the compiler every time I added a new feature that "wow, the semantics work exactly how I'd like them to for ease of implementation."

Compare that to, say, Rust, which would be pretty painful to single-pass compile with all the non-local behavior around traits.

[eru]

What you are saying is true for a naive C compiler.

Once you want to optimize or analyse, things become more complicated.

> Compare that to, say, Rust, which would be pretty painful to single-pass compile with all the non-local behavior around traits.

Type inference also spans a whole function, so you can't do it in a single pass through the code. (But it's still tamer than in eg Haskell, where type inference considers your whole program.)