Just to reinforce Robert. I did a language on the VM called Joxa a few years ago. Originally the compiler was written in Erlang. At some point we converted it to be self hosting and the cost of maintenance went up considerably. Even worse, it made it *much* harder for folks not familiar with the infrastructure to get up to speed and contribute. There is some upside to being able to say that a language compiles itself. However, in the beam environment I think that upside is vastly outweighed by the downsides.
Sent from [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com), encrypted email based in Switzerland. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [elixir-core:5789] Self-hosted Elixir? Local Time: May 23, 2016 12:52 PM UTC Time: May 23, 2016 7:52 PM From: [email protected] To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] It would definitely make it more difficult to download the sources and build a release. You would need quite a few pre-compiled modules to do that. Now all you need is Erlang which you need anyway to run the system. Robert On Monday, 23 May 2016 10:34:52 UTC+2, José Valim wrote: A self-hosted compiler is honestly very low priority. The benefits are very small compared to the complications required for bootstrapping the language, which would likely include keeping a list of precompiled modules in the source so we can bootstrap without having Elixir pre-installed. José Valim [www.plataformatec.com.br](http://www.plataformatec.com.br/) Skype: jv.ptec Founder and Director of R&D On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Daniel Azuma <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all, I've been working off and on for a few months on an Erlang->Elixir transpiler (mostly as an exercise for myself to learn Erlang semantics). I recently had the idea of applying it to the Erlang code in the Elixir core, creating a version of the Elixir compiler written completely in Elixir. Long story short, there are some caveats in the build process and a few bugs in the transpiler to work around, but today I finally got a proof of concept working and passing the tests. So I was wondering whether the possibility of self-hosting the Elixir compiler had been discussed before. My initial thoughts were that it's often interesting to self-host; however, in this case all the core code would have to remain written in a "bootstrap" style of Elixir without access to the standard library, which might be awkward. But I was curious what else might have been discussed and what people's thoughts were. Thanks, Daniel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/76F2675C-E59D-40C1-80F7-D057984781E9%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit [https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/0b5ce71a-a288-4dd5-8300-c7e3482ff735%40googlegroups.com](https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/0b5ce71a-a288-4dd5-8300-c7e3482ff735%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer). For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/sak7CobKBem76YV5FUn6GlGe_auMx51_1UrIAJVXXFSfJvXgMA0tRLxCJ98Ed4BZYas1Hc3rQ40NfZQauqa_uA%3D%3D%40merritt.tech. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
