Hacker News Reader

You have simply made one tiny step, that the guys who used AI and $25,000 to write a C compiler in Rust, could not make:

You are using the compiler to compile itself.

"TCC is its own test set." Absolutely brilliant.

View on HN

Back in the 90s gcc did a three-stage build to isolate the result from weakness in the vendor native compiler (so, vendor builds gcc0, gcc0 builds gcc1, gcc1 builds gcc2 - and you compare gcc2 to gcc1 to look for problems.) It was popularly considered a "self test suite" until someone did some actual profiling and concluded that gcc only needed about 20% of gcc to compile itself :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com