[Mono-list] Re: Bootstrapping

Jon Watte hplus@b500.com
Tue, 6 Jul 2004 09:35:44 -0700


> An initial C# compiler.

> > How did *that* get compiled?  I'm trying to do this *completely* from
> > scratch.

> The mono C# compiler is written in C#, just like the GNU C compiler is
> written in C.

> How did you compile GCC?  You need to have a pre-compiled or
> cross-compiled version of the compiler to build it the first time.  It's
> the same story here.

The VERY first C compiler was probably written in Assembly, or Pascal, or
something... If we were really paranoid, we'd keep the source for that
around. And the PDP/8 it ran on ;-) (Brian Kernighan has a great speech on
this topic, btw: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/)

Mono, the runtime wasn't written in C#, was it? If so, is it reasonable
to expect to boot-strap mono something like this?

1) build MCS using .NET on Windows
2) build the runtime
3) use the output of 2) to run the output of 1) to self-compile

Cheers,

			/ h+