Bootstrap compiler

In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler (or assembler) in the source programming language that it intends to compile. Applying this technique leads to a self-hosting compiler. An initial minimal core version of the compiler is generated in a different language (which could be assembly language); from that point, successive expanded versions of the compiler are run using the minimal core of the language.

Many compilers for many programming languages are bootstrapped, including compilers for BASIC, Algol, C, D, Pascal, PL/I, Factor, Haskell, Modula-2, Oberon, OCaml, Common Lisp, Scheme, Go, Java, Rust, Python, Scala, Nim, Eiffel, and more.

Bootstrapping a compiler has the following advantages:

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