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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

First - awesome job. Congrats. Self hosting is an accomplishment!

But I'm curious to get your thoughts on the process in hindsight.

I understand why it's valuable: to cast a wide net in catching bugs and give a good signal that your language is generally "ready".

I'm working on a similar language, but worried about going down the self-hosting path, as I think it'd slow me down rather than speed me up.

How did it work for you?

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What's the actual accomplishment here? It seems like the language came into existence a month ago and was written mostly by Claude. If self hosting is a matter of asking Claude to do it and it takes a couple weeks, is it really an accomplishment at all?

Yes, somebody has to actually do it, and they did.

Anything + Go's runtime is a reasonable language.

Go's runtime is one of the greatest pieces of software ever built.

Assuming this works - which self-hosting guarantees a minimum level of "working" - this is useful!

I didn't want to rely on the unpredictability of a garbage collector, so I chose to build my own runtime, but it's not going to be as good as Go any time soon.

"I could have made that!"

"Yes, but you didn't."

Derw, a human written Elm fork by me, is largely self-hosted. I took that decision with inspiration from Go: 1) it gave me a large codebase which could be used to assess language features on and 2) it gave me motivation to improve generalized performance rather than focusing on the niche use cases (web-rendering).

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