In which language are the Java compiler and JVM written?

The precise phrasing of the question is slightly misleading: it is not "the JVM" or "the compiler" as there are multiple JVM vendors (jrockit is one, IBM another) and multiple compilers out there.

• The Sun JVM is written in C, although this need not be the case - the JVM as it runs on your machine is a platform-dependent executable and hence could have been originally written in any language. For example, the original IBM JVM was written in Smalltalk

• The Java libraries (java.lang, java.util etc, often referred to as the Java API) are themselves written in Java, although methods marked as native will have been written in C or C++.

• I believe that the Java compiler provided by Sun is also written in Java. (Although again, there are multiple compilers out there)

From Java Docs

The compiler is written in Java and the runtime is written in ANSI C

The very first Java compiler was developed by Sun Microsystems and was written in C using some libraries from C++. Today, the Java compiler is written in Java, while the JRE is written in C.

We can imagine how the Java compiler was written in Java like this:

The Java compiler is written as a Java program and then compiled with the Java compiler written in C(the first Java compiler). Thus we can use the newly compiled Java compiler(written in Java) to compile Java programs.