> Self-hosted compilers are interesting from the standpoint of "eat your own
> dogfood".  For example, I wonder if OpenMP implementations would be better
> if compiler authors were forced to parallelize the guts of their compilers
> with OpenMP :-)
>
> On the other hand, one should choose the right tool for the right purpose.
> Compilers are different applications from solving PDEs.  One would never
> write a compiler in Fortran, at least since C has existed, because Fortran
> is not a good language for system software, and a compiler often depends
> upon those features.

It's worth noting that, in developing Chapel, we thought a lot about how 
to make it a good language to write a compiler (with parallel analysis 
passes) in, and I believe that, modulo our current issues with records and 
strings, that it generally would be.  While I agree that I wouldn't want 
to write 'chpl' in Fortran, Chapel is not Fortran.  If we had the funding 
and mandate to rewrite 'chpl' in Chapel, I'd do it in a heartbeat.  But I 
think it's unlikely that anyone outside of the "Is your PL as macho as 
mine?" circles would care much...

We do eat our own dogfood in the sense that we have 74+k lines of Chapel 
in our internal and standard modules (counted using wc -l, not SLOC, so 
that's slightly inflated, but still... a lot of Chapel code).

-Brad

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