Not meant as a dismissal at all. I just noted that the phenomenon in which big complex C programs evolve into using features of higher level languages (like garbage collection instead of the regular malloc+free approach) is well known. Games are famous for using frame-bound arenas.
GCC wanted to run on anything that had enough RAM, so it's written in C (and now I think C++). I think a language with garbage collection and ML style pattern matching would be nicer for writing a compiler, and I don't think porting the GC runtime to every platform is that much work, but Microsoft didn't rewrite their compilers in F# and Oracle didn't rewrite the Java compilers in Scala, so maybe I'm missing something.
First, it's easier often to opt in to higher level functionality when useful then to opt out of high level language features. As for why no one ported compilers yet... that's a ton of work, even if they wanted to, for no benefit.
GCC wanted to run on anything that had enough RAM, so it's written in C (and now I think C++). I think a language with garbage collection and ML style pattern matching would be nicer for writing a compiler, and I don't think porting the GC runtime to every platform is that much work, but Microsoft didn't rewrite their compilers in F# and Oracle didn't rewrite the Java compilers in Scala, so maybe I'm missing something.