Programming Language Lineage Graph

An evidence-cited atlas of what programming languages are written in: their compilers, runtimes, virtual machines and bootstrap chains, mapped separately from which languages influenced which. Every relationship links to the source that supports it.

Open the interactive graph · Read the programming language family tree

Answers that changed over time

• Rust: rustc was written in OCaml until Rust began compiling itself in 2011.
• Go: the compiler was written in C until Go 1.5 (2015) translated it to Go.
• Zig: the compiler was C++ until 2022, when the self-hosted Zig compiler replaced it.
• Python: CPython, the reference implementation, is written in C.
• Java: javac is written in Java, while the HotSpot JVM is written in C++.

Kinds of relationship, kept apart

• Compiler written in and runtime written in: what an implementation is built from.
• Bootstrap chains: what the first compiler was written in before a language could compile itself.
• Transpiled to: languages that compile to another high-level language.
• Rewritten in: implementations moved to a different language.
• Influenced: design ideas borrowed from earlier languages, with no code dependency.

Explore

• Language pages and compilers, runtimes and engines
• What is X written in? questions
• How compiler bootstrapping works
• Timeline of programming languages
• Download the open dataset and read how it works