&gt; <i>It gives me a funny sense of pride that my compiler can now be used to improve itself.</i><p>Only with difficulty, because your compiler is written in a language that is poorly suited for writing compilers.<p>How about using nice high level language whose implementation is partially written in C to write a C compiler <i>in</i> that nice high level language which then compiles that partially-written-in-C component of the implementation of that high level language.