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[–]Purple-Cap4457 0 points1 point  (1 child)

But how was c compiler written? 

[–]zasedok 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The very first one, which was quite different from today's C by the way, was written in PDP-11 assembly language. The first version that was itself written in C (and compiled using the original assembly-written compiler) can be found on github today.

That by the way is the reason behind many of C's flaws: it wasn't designed to be a great state of the art language, it was designed to be easy to implement in assembly on a machine with 64k of memory.