Do you write the first compiler in another programming language? And the fully rewrite the compiler once the first compiler is mature enough to produce reliable builds, compile the new compiler on that first compiler, in order to have a compiler that is written in the same language as the one it’s compiling?
If this is the case, and this might be a stupid question, why would want to? You’ll essentially be throwing away potentially years of work on that first compiler just to have a circularly compiling programming language? What benefits could this have to make the extra effort worth it?
Drew devault is currently writing a systems programming language and i learnt a lot from that. For instance, a bootstrap compiler written in C is useful for packaging and adapting the new language to a new processor architecture or similar things.
The language is somewhat “in the public” but Drew asks that it remains a secret until it is more mature.
Also interesting is this thread on the alpine linux devel list regarding self hosted compilers like rust. In essence, rust is difficult to package, because you need rust to compile rust.