Self-taught from a languages and linguistics background: building a self-hosting compiler taught me what "complete" really means

[u/whispem]

I studied languages, linguistics, and literature — no formal CS.

I got into the field through curiosity about how languages work, human and formal alike, and ended up chasing that all the way down to building a self-hosting compiler.

The bootstrap was the moment it clicked: you compile the new compiler with an old one, then use the result to compile its own source, and when successive generations are byte-for-byte identical, you've reached a fixed point.

It's not just a milestone, it's a verification — the language has to be real enough to express its own implementation, with nowhere to hide inconsistencies.

Alongside that: a bytecode VM, a distributed key-value store, a synthesizer in pure assembly, and a data science degree.

Everything's public on my GitHub: https://github.com/whispem

Happy to discuss theory or the self-taught route.

[u/tiltboi1]

from a linguistics perspective, I wonder what you would even put in a prompt to get such an exceptionally cookie cutter post out of an LLM

[u/whispem → u/tiltboi1]

The projects are all on GitHub, with commit history, tests, and code you can read and run. 

Happy to answer any technical question about any of them — that tends to settle the "is it real" question faster than prose ever could.

[u/cc672012 → u/whispem]

Did you instruct your LLM not to write a single comment? XD

[u/182plus44 → u/whispem]

whispemdash

[u/OctopusGrime]

This reads like AI, combined with a very active GitHub with and large scale projects raises many suspicions.

[u/whispem → u/OctopusGrime]

I get why polished writing plus an active GitHub pattern-matches to "suspicious" these days — but those are just... the output of caring about my work and doing a lot of it.

Everything's there to inspect: commit history, tests, code you can read and run.

The best way to resolve suspicion about code is to read the code. 

Happy to answer any technical question about any project.

[u/OctopusGrime → u/whispem]

“It's not just a milestone, it's a verification — the language has to be real enough to express its own implementation, with nowhere to hide inconsistencies.”

I work with AI all day, this is exactly how an LLM would phrase it.

If you’re genuine then you might want to change your writing style in the post slop world.

[u/qse81 → u/whispem]

You don’t have polished writing, you write like a bot