Well, they were clearly upset at losing the contract.
But mostly they were trying to say, "Okay, you probably have a guy who can do that. But it will be a buggy mess and it will go better if you don't give that dev permission to be a hero."
I still don't follow. A year seems like plenty of time to build a c compiler. Maybe it won't generate the best code, but no compiler did, back in the day.
