DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

To me it is a question of priorities. I would rather have a language be easy to bootstrap then hard, and rust for example would definitely benefit from easier bootstrapping. But then again, it would benefit from a lot of things and and all of these require effort that can not be invested in other things.

Reproducible builds are much more important than easy bootstrapping in my opinion, because that way you need less trust because you can infer trust in one step of the bootstrap chain from the one before without having to do the entire bootstrap chain from scratch. And with reproducible builds, it only takes one person going through the full bootstrap chain to notice if something fishy is going on in a binary release.

Also note that nobody can ever review all the code that they're using, so a reliance on trusting other people is always required. Running a bootstrap yourself can help you only marginally with that.