Now can we unsee it?

It isn't a good idea for a production system or anything, but the code itself seems pretty clean. I've seen infinitely worse bash scripts than this compiler.

I wonder if it's good enough to bootstrap better and better compilers until you can build full on GCC?

Here's a couple of projects along those lines. https://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html

> Mes aims to create an entirely source-based bootstrapping path.

https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/

> A class of minimal bootstrap binaries that has a reproducible build on all platforms. Providing a verifiable base for defeating the trusting trust attack.

(and comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264848 ).