Actually, C compilers back then were still pretty large (also, as far as I'm aware, every machine that UNIX originated on was at least 16-bit, and the very firs

Actually, C compilers back then were still pretty large (also, as far as I'm aware, every machine that UNIX originated on was at least 16-bit, and the very first machine it ran on was 18-bit): https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/... The language was quite a bit smaller, though, and much less complex. A C2X compiler will be drastically more tedious to make than this was.