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I thought gcc built its own bootstrap compiler to do the heavy lifting of the build. Can LLVM not build the bootstrap compiler or was I mistaken in thinking this?

The bootstrap process for gcc involves first building gcc with an existing C compiler, then rebuilding gcc from this first build [1].

I'm still waiting for my build to finish, but i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 seems to be handling the gcc 4.7 source fine.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/install/build.html

Ah for some reason I had in my head the bootstrap was a smaller, simpler compiler. Thanks for the link and clarification.

Actually, I just confirmed that i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 compiles gcc 4.7

I don't know what other versions of llvm-gcc are shipped with Mac OS X

Mac OS X also ships with a non-compiler version of gcc, i.e. `gcc-4.2` on lion.

I built GCC 4.6.3 with GCC 4.2 using the LLVM backend without any problem.