[tomatocracy]

This[0] repo which has the stage0 code used by GPs linked repo includes some explanation in the README about why not Forth or Lisp - in summary it turned out to be harder than that, at least for the authors of that project.

0. https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

[nine_k]

This is pretty interesting. But the author sets a much more difficult goal:

> the goal of creating a bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC, with only the explicit requirement of a single 1 KByte binary or less.

Iä! I would not limit the size drastically, but would emphasize simplicity and legibility, in hopes that achieving correctness this way would be easier.

[kragen]

legibility is a lost cause in the case of the binary seed anyway, so you might as well shoot for more simplicity. https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/4715ae5292a6... is down to 512 bytes, and it's clearly possible to go further than that