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I'm of course not Andrew Kelley ;-), but I think it's strategic. C++ would be indeed less productive than Haskell when you write a language implementation, but

I'm of course not Andrew Kelley ;-), but I think it's strategic. C++ would be indeed less productive than Haskell when you write a language implementation, but if the target audience---at least initially---already knows C++ then writing a compiler in suboptimal languages may help. I know this is not universally applicable; for example Rust bootstrapped from OCaml, but it has achieved self-hosting very early in its life (and back when the goal of the language was not yet certain), so that might have been also strategic.

grumpyprole 4y ago
Writing the initial compiler in C++ is a rather surprising choice. My time would be too precious for that. OCaml was a good choice from the Rust devs and had a nice influence on the language. Rust has proper algebraic data types and pattern matching.
- TUSF 4y ago
  They wrote it in C++, because llvm is in C++. Currently the only critical parts of the Zig compiler that are in C++ are the bindings to llvm and I think stuff for linking clang.