Well, once the anic compiler is complete, it would perhaps be a good idea to rewrite it in ANI itself and have it be self hosting, but to get to that stage, you have to write it in another language first. What language? Any at all - whatever you're most familiar in is probably a good choice (and probably why a lot of them are written in C).
I agree. Though your grandfather comment still confuses me.
If you are implementing a language (for which you also have some say in its design) and your compiler is too slow, then I would start e.g. by investigating caching strategies instead of switching implementation languages.
Sure. I would personally only ever switch once, if at all, and that is to use the language itself so that its self hosted. I wouldn't switch for speed reasons, unless the performance is really really really bad and I can't seem to fix it.
Oh, it might be worth to switch from e.g. C to Haskell for the compiler. Especially if your language isn't that well-suited for compiler work, you won't get much out of self-hosting. Paul Graham wrote a bit on this when justifying why Arc won't be self-hosting.
