About the front-end & dogfood

[Jascha Wetzel]

Russell Lewis wrote:
> The inelegant, but practical, answer is "the previous version of the D 
> compiler."  It's how gcc works, basically.  When you download gcc to a 
> box, it has a bootstrap mode which is designed to be compilable on just 
> about any old C compiler.  Once that is built, then that bootstrap 
> compiler is used to actually compile the gcc code (the full gcc sources 
> use some features which might or might not work with other compilers). 
> At least, that's how I remember it.
> 
> This obviously doesn't work if you are the first guy to write a compiler 
> on a given platform, but on an existing platform with existing historic 
> compilers, it works.
> 
> <plug>
> 
> This is another good reason for "dsimpl," which I suggested (in a 
> previous post) that we write.  You could write the front-end in complex, 
> advanced D, translate it to "simple D" using "dsimpl" and then build the 
> compiler using a simplistic D compiler.
> 
> </plug>

or you could just cross-compile, which sounds like it should be easier.