The only way to re-bootstrap is to download a compiled (JS) release from npm, then use that to compile the .kal source in the git repository. Then you can use your newly compiled version of kal to recompile itself. This is how I create the npm releases.

It's not turtles all the way down, though. If you look way back, the 0.1ish releases of the compiler were written in CoffeeScript. I ported the compiler source over from CoffeeScript file by file as it matured and eventually got rid of the dependency entirely. Technically, you could start with the last release that was written in CoffeeScript and compile up to the current release.