It's called bootstrapping. It's the hard part of any new language, esp lower level ones. Your first iteration will be very manual/low level, until your compiler

It's called bootstrapping. It's the hard part of any new language, esp lower level ones. Your first iteration will be very manual/low level, until your compiler gets sophisticated enough to compile itself, granted your trust it enough to do the right thing. It can take many iterations to get to the point that you trust your compiler works well enough for daily use to build itself and then you can slowly start discarding the older pieces from earlier iterations. On some level I think Rust will become a major player for building compilers with (and obviously drivers), and since it is a portable executable and safe/predictable, there is a good chance the the compiler dev won't need to switch to his own language to compile itself, unless ofcoarse a point of pride, some specific functionality that rust cannot do or if the person just don't like rust. Compiler development is a different beast altogether from most forms of programming, and I highly recommend you build a basic one as a hobby project. It will let you appreciate the shoulders of giants we are standing. Same goes for 3D/physics engines, audio/signal processing and so on. Building a basic filesystem or database that supports indexes and a strict schema that has some form of relational theory in it is also highly enlightening and will dispell the magic of sql engines (and make you appreciate those that came before you and their struggle to get where we are today).