Hacker News Reader

Why isn't it written in Go and bootstrapped?

1. AFAIK, Go itself isnt self-hosting, either.

2. If I were to aim for a self-hosted go on the JVM, this could easily be one of the steps. Compile a 'Go written in Go' with this, and you are done (well, you would probably want to tune the runtime afterwards to get decent performance, but those are 'merely' details)

Yea, self-hosting is neat, but also makes bootstrapping much more complicated, specially when the language is still changing.

> specially when the language is still changing.

I think this is the biggest reason. Go has been stabilizing over the past few months but it definitely still is in development. Gofix helps with this but only so far...

Well, some language communities consider it to be a point of pride to be self-hosting (e.g. Java) but for others (e.g. Python) it's not a big deal.

I believe RPython to be a proper subset of Python, and PyPy is written in RPython.

You need to bootstrap off CPython to compile the compiler, of course!

This is another area where Go prefers pragmatism over everything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com