> Walter and I have had a long conversation about the next radical thing
> to do to improve D's standing. Like others in this community, we believe
> it's a good time to consider bootstrapping the compiler. Having the D
> compiler written in D has quite a few advantages, among which taking
> advantages of D's features and having a large codebase that would be its
> own test harness.

Two points from the viewpoint of the Debian distribution:

Debian is ported to many different platforms and in average one new platform
port started every year. A huge pain point for porters are circular (or
self) dependencies. A lot of effort goes into breaking such circles.