[Answers] Can a cross-compiler be self-hosting?

Problem Detail: 

My understanding is that a self-hosting compiler will take as input the language it is written in and a cross-compiler will output a language which runs on a platform which is different to what it runs on.

Can we combine these two compiler types into one?

Asked By : Haych

Answered By : jmite

This is certainly possible, and there are two possibilities:

1. There are two compilers for a language. For example, Haskell has GHC, and GHCJS, which is a JavaScript cross-compiler. GHC is written in Haskell, and GHCJS is written in Haskell (and normally compiled with GHC), so GHCJS is a self-hosted cross-compiler.

2. You run your self-hosted cross-compiler in a target language. So, if you had a Foo to Python cross-compiler, and it's the only compiler for Foo, and it's written in Foo, it can be self hosting, but you would have to cross-compile it, then run the result in a Python interpreter.

Basically, be careful that you don't confuse a language with a compiler. A language can have many compilers.

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/56531

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