Funny you should mention that! There was a really cool article about bootstrapping a compiler nearly from scratch just the other day[1]. But yeah, most people just start with C or C++ until they can compile enough of the language to write a compiler in it.
Some other interesting contemporary examples:
I think as we speak Go is working on its plan to switch from using a compiler written in Go[2].
Rust[3] has kind of a hybrid approach where the front-end of the compiler is written in rust, but generates llvm bytecode which is then compiled the rest of the way by llvm itself. It takes three "stages" for them to do a full compile, first a binary "snapshot" compiler is downloaded and used to compile the compiler (stage 0), then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 1), and then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 2). Stage 2 is actually just a test - its output should be identical to that of stage 1, and if it isn't, something went wrong.
There is a classic lecture from Ken Thompson[4] that I think is really illuminating on how this stuff works, if you're unfamiliar with it.
Some other interesting contemporary examples:
I think as we speak Go is working on its plan to switch from using a compiler written in Go[2].
Rust[3] has kind of a hybrid approach where the front-end of the compiler is written in rust, but generates llvm bytecode which is then compiled the rest of the way by llvm itself. It takes three "stages" for them to do a full compile, first a binary "snapshot" compiler is downloaded and used to compile the compiler (stage 0), then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 1), and then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 2). Stage 2 is actually just a test - its output should be identical to that of stage 1, and if it isn't, something went wrong.
There is a classic lecture from Ken Thompson[4] that I think is really illuminating on how this stuff works, if you're unfamiliar with it.
It's really fascinating stuff!
[1]: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/bcompiler.... [2]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P3BLR31VA8cvLJLfMibSuTdw... [3]: http://www.rust-lang.org/ [4]: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html