What a Language Needs Before It Can Compile Itself

Code: Megapixel99/lambda-language lm is a small low-level language I wrote: static types, explicit memory, no closures, no garbage collector, and four independent backends that emit C, WebAssembly, ARM64 and bytecode for a VM. Its compiler is about 4,400 lines of JavaScript. The obvious next question is whether the language can compile itself, and the obvious first step is the lexer, which is 129 lines. In lm the same lexer is 355 lines. That ratio is the finding, because almost none of it is lm being a verbose language. Six specific absences account for nearly all of it, and writing them down was a planned milestone rather than an afterthought: the point of porting the lexer first was to find out what the language could not do while the port was still small enough to abandon. The one that cost the most src/lexer.js has a single advance(n) that moves pos , line and col together, called from 14 places. lm had no way to take the address of a scalar local, so a function could not mutate a caller's variable, and a function returning three values would need a struct allocated on every call. So advance does not exist. All 14 sites write pos += 1; col += 1; inline, and the newline case writes the three-line variant. That is the single largest source of the size difference, and it also caused the only correctness bug in the port. Column counting inside a string literal has to skip UTF-8 continuation bytes, and because the logic is inlined rather than centralised there is no one place to fix it. The two comment scanners over-count a column in exactly the same way. They get away with it only because a comment always ends at a newline, which resets the column before anything reads it. That is worth sitting with. A centralised advance would have been fixed once and been right in all three places. Instead the code is right in one place by correction and in two others by luck, and the luck is load-bearing: change what terminates a comment and two latent bugs become live ones. Dup