Ask HN: I'm building a toy language. At what point should it become self-hosted?

3 points

a month ago

I first sketched out the core of my language in C back in 2021. After finally paying off my debts, I started working on it again as a toy project, partly to study and partly to see how far I can get by working together with LLMs.

As many of you know, a lot of programming languages eventually become self-hosted. I’m wondering when that usually makes sense.

Right now, the language is not something I expect other people to use seriously. I write and review the C code myself, while the LLVM side is mostly generated with help from an LLM and then checked by me. At this point, the basic skeleton is complete, but I would still call it alpha rather than beta. The next step is to review the details and fix the weak points.

So my question is: when does it usually make sense to start self-hosting a language implementation?

Here is the toy language I’m working on:

https://github.com/srtdog64/PergyraLang