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Pretty amusing/scary/insane the number of times you see a chain of languages (automake, perl, python, etc) where you need version X-1 to compile X. The dangers of dog fooding new features into the core tooling.

Which is how I think Rust works? So to bootstrap Rust requires building every version since the language was self hosted.

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There is also mrustc [0] which can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 and then you can continue from there.

[0] https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

See also https://notgull.net/announcing-dozer/ -- removes C++ and LLVM from the stack needed to bootstrap Rust.

That’s to be expected with any bootstrapped language. What’s insane is how relatively recent a version some of the GNU tools depend on, with one version in there depending on itself!

I think it’d be a good policy for any bootstrapped tool or language’s build to depend on no later than the last released previous major version. Intermediate bootstrap levels (e.g. miniperl) are fine, as long as one can start from the previous major.

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