IMO, unless you have really serious reasons, it would be silly to turn "a decade of hard work" into two decades of hard work. With an even lower chance of your

IMO, unless you have really serious reasons, it would be silly to turn "a decade of hard work" into two decades of hard work. With an even lower chance of your new language getting traction. Nothing prevents you from launching a working language first and then replacing the backend later. That's what Zig folks are working on at the moment. And nightly Rust recently got experimental support for Cranelift backend. Compiler frontends don't start out self-hosted either, anyway. Because it's literally impossible. The first implementation has to use something else that already exists