Question

I’m interested to know how programming languages are interpreted by machines. I was looking at some language comparison/benchmarks and noticed that some programming languages are written in the C programming language while others were written in others. For example Ruby and JVM (although not a language) are written in C. But why did the people who wrote Ruby or JVM write it in C? Couldn’t they write it in a way like C, which , I guess, wasn’t written in another language. 🙂 Was it just because not to reinvent the wheel or is C the god of machines?

Answer 1

One has to write them in something. They could be written directly in machine language (actual processor instructions) but that would be very cumbersome – and not portable. So another – preferably standard, portable and ubiquitous – language (like C) is a much better option.