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Comment by sixthDot | Hacker News Reader

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sixthDot·

As a compiler developper (yeah _I'm something of a_ ...) I'm shoked to see

- https://github.com/val-lang/val/issues/758

- https://github.com/val-lang/val/issues/711

That smells bad implementation. You should self-host ASAP guys, you'll find more basic bugs like that. Yet 500+ stars !

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As another compiler developer, there are few mistakes more damaging than self-hosting too soon. A language will be a net benefit for small and medium programs long, long before it's a net benefit for (and has the tooling for) a project as big as a compiler. I'm glad they're not rushing it.

Bugs like that in a production compiler could be worrying. In a compiler for a language still being defined, not so much. Compare Rust 1.0 vs 1.71 to see how much of a gulf there is between "first stable release" and "compiler of a stable language with lots of real world usage".

Self hosting is also not the be-all and end-all. It is a symbolic milestone, more than anything. Achieving it is something to celebrate, but not something to hold against the language until much later on their development cycle, if at all.

Swift itself still doesn’t self host and is approaching a version 6 release. I’m not a compiler developer but the outcome of all the discussions around this topic in the Swift community was that it wasn’t worthwhile yet.

Where was that discussion held? I'd like to read what people were thinking.

There's quite a few discussions around the topic here forums.swift.org

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