> You seem to miss, again, that there was already a complete Zig compiler coded in C++. No, there wasn't. They had a half-implemented compiler in C++ which imp

> You seem to miss, again, that there was already a complete Zig compiler coded in C++. No, there wasn't. They had a half-implemented compiler in C++ which implemented just enough features to compile the proper zig compiler. It didn't have feature parity. > Obviously the second compiler for Zig was done because the author wanted to. It only tells us its author took time to code ... a strictly unnecessary program, instead of doing something actually useful. You think dogfooding isn't useful? Wow, thats a really bold claim. I know legions of product engineers who would line up to disagree with you. Dogfooding is tremendously useful. Failing to dogfood creates an empathy gap with your audience. (You don't understand your own work as well!). If you don't immerse yourself in your own creative output (eg, rust developers writing rust code, musicians listening to their own music, etc) then your output is usually lower quality because you aren't training your taste. How do you know what design decisions are good and bad, or what to focus on, if you aren't using your own output? And not dogfooding is a motivation killer on passion projects. Why build something for fun when you don't even get to enjoy the fruits of your own labor? I suppose Andrew Kelly could have a second medium-to-large project that he uses Zig for in order to understand his users. And he could go back and forth between coding Zig in C++ and coding that other project in Zig. (I think Jonathan Blow does that with Jai.) But that sounds like a huge waste of effort when he could just be spending all his time writing the zig compiler in zig, which is what he wants to be doing anyway. I'm not making a technical argument. V8 seems to work fine despite being written entirely in C++. But V8 is just programming to a spec someone else wrote. Programming language specs don't come out fully formed. They need to be thought through, experimented with and obsessively argued over. How would Zig become a good language if the team that invents it doesn't even programming in it themselves?