Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

What on earth are you talking about?

Assembly. Java. Ruby. Python. The list goes on.

Could you explain your rationale behind this statement?

Point me to a compiler or interpreter, any of them, that isn't either written in C or written in something that was written in C. And of course, whatever you play with, it's running on an operating system written in C.

If programming is turtles all the way down, C is the bottom turtle, standing on the solid ground of Von Neumann architecture.

The point is, C is utterly pervasive. Everything that we think is different from C is made from C.

> Point me to a compiler or interpreter, any of them, that isn't either written in C or written in something that was written in C.

Plenty of languages have self-hosting compilers or interpreters available, which are neither written in C nor written in something written in C.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)#Li...

I'm also pretty sure that some are written in C++, whose implementations are usually also written in C++, and which (while closely related to C) is not C.

> And of course, whatever you play with, it's running on an operating system written in C.

That's obviously not the case if what you are playing with is an OS written in not-C. It's actually not entirely true in plenty of cases, because operating systems that use C range from almost-entirely C (with some assembly) to C-among-other-things (e.g., z/OS and it's mix of PL/X, HLASM, and C/C++.)

> If programming is turtles all the way down, C is the bottom turtle

I’m pretty sure the bottom turtle is native machine code and/or processor microcode.

Go is written in Go, which is why you need it installed in the first place before you can run the go compiler.

Except for versions before 1.5, which were written in C.

Spoiler: I hear the first C compilers were probably not written in C, until they were.

Bootstrapping problems are interesting/frustrating, especially if you're trying to get a new package into Debian.

If you wanted to build Go from source, what would you build first? What version(s)?

Edit: the documentation is outstanding - https://golang.org/doc/install/source#go14

clang, among the most popular C compilers, is itself not written in C, but rather C++.

The very first C compiler wasn't written in C though.

In that case the first C compiler also didn't compile C.

How exactly is that?

I think the point that he is making is that most popular modern implementations of assemblers, Java compilers/JVM's, Ruby and Python interpreters are written in C, or in a language which itself was bootstrapped from C, eg. C++.

I guess the point is that the other languages are based on C. From your list CPython, CRuby and the GNU assembler are written in C. Not sure about Java.

Edit: not necessarily agreeing, there must be some languages that do not rely on C.

Java runs on the JVM, which is probably written in C++ (which is C, when you start digging). The widely-used Eclipse J9 JVM is written in C++.

> C++ (which is C, when you start digging).

C++ is not C (it was once implemented as a preprocessor in front of a C compiler, but that's not th same as being C, and it's now more likely to implemented as a self-hosting compiler.)

Ironically enough, the gcc suite itself is partially implemented in C++ these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com