[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+