But can you maintain that?

Sriram Krishnan posted something interesting about the CLR garbage collector:

I was talking to a former MSFT employee who worked on the CLR team. The conversation drifted towards languages used to implement virtual machines. Here's what I learnt.

The CLR's Garbage Collection was initially written in Lisp by a Patrick Dussud (I can't find a blog). This code was then run through a Lisp->C converter which was then cleaned up by an intern.

That's interesting - it demonstrates to me that when MS needed something done fast, they knew well enough not to do it in C or C++ (assuming this story is correct, of course). On the other hand, if you do what they did:

• Write a sub-system in language 1
• Generate the C from the resulting code
• Manually modify the results

Can you actually maintain the results? Generated code is always hard to grok. It's one thing if you write in a high level langiage and then generate C (never actually looking at the C) - you can look at the C as something akin to byte code in that case. But if you muck with the generated code before deploying it? I'm not sure that you end up with something you can maintain...