[swift-dev] Bootstrapping Swift compiler

[Joe Groff]

> On Dec 3, 2015, at 10:31 PM, David Owens II <david at owensd.io> wrote:
> 
> LLVM is usable from C APIs and can be used from within Swift. There might be a few rough edges, but it’s doable. That said, it’s a lot of work to re-write the compiler simply to bootstrap itself, and frankly, while the syntax of the language is still in high flux, it would be a bit of a foolish task with very little gain.
> 
> I could see it potentially happening later (or a small team to start on it after v3), but there is so much missing from Swift right now that I don’t see the team spending any significant amount of time to do work that won’t bring any developer-facing features to the table.

This is definitely true. Swift also tends to rely on bleeding-edge LLVM/Clang features and fixes, and the C APIs for interacting with LLVM and Clang lag behind the C++ implementations since the C APIs need to be stable.

-Joe