Dotty self-bootstrapping

Today’s little tidbit of Dotty News doesn’t have anything to do with the language itself, but it’s still a nice milestone: as of yesterday, Dotty is now compiling itself.

Given that Scala compilation is a pretty complex and sophisticated problem, it’s great to see that the compiler has reaching this self-bootstrapping point…

Clarification: I received the following correction from Guillaume, clarifying exactly what has changed:

Hey @jducoeur I just saw [this article] so I wanted to clarify that Dotty has been able to compile itself for several years already (https://scala-lang.org/blog/2015/10/23/dotty-compiler-bootstraps.html), what changed in lampepfl/dotty#5923 is that we know use a released version of Dotty to compile Dotty initially (before compiling it with itself), whereas before we used Scala 2 for that. Which means we can start using Dotty features in Dotty itself for dogfooding purposes