alt Hacker NewsYeah, didn't mention gas or ld, for similar reasons. I agree that a compiler doesn't necessarily "need" those.
I don't agree that all the claims are backed up by their own comments, which means that there's probably other places where it falls down.
Its... Misrepresentation.
Like Chicken is a Scheme compiler. But they're very up front that it depends on a C compiler.
Here, they wrote a C compiler that is at least sometimes reliant on having a different C compiler around. So is the project at 50%? 75%?
Even if its 99%, thats not the same story as they tried to write. And if they wrote that tale instead, it would be more impressive, rather than "There's some holes. How many?"
Their C compiler is not reliant on having another C compiler around. Compiling the 16-bit real mode bootstrap for the Linux kernel on x86(-64) requires another C compiler; you certainly don't need another compiler to compile the kernel for another architecture, or to compile another piece of software not subject to the 32k constraint.
The compiler itself is entirely functional; it just can't generate code optimal enough to fit within the constraints for that very specific (tiny!) part of the system, so another compiler is required to do that step.