1. Funny. Last time I built Cargo it insisted on downloading Cargo, and I've never seen even a hint that it can build itself without that. I needed to download

1. Funny. Last time I built Cargo it insisted on downloading Cargo, and I've never seen even a hint that it can build itself without that. I needed to download dependencies manually, compile them manually, and compile Cargo's code manually as well. > 2. You are incorrect about Rust. Rust is written in Rust, not C++, And how that renders me incorrect? GHC is written in Haskell, but you can build it with C compiler (and then recompile again, now with Haskell compiler). But indeed I was wrong. I remembered incorrectly that I built Rust cleanly and without network activity. I actually downloaded sources and issued compilation command, without any regard for packaging, so it could do any stupid stuff like downloading things when compiling. > and so building Rust involves downloading a binary of a previous Rust. That's what 'boostrapping' means. No. "Bootstrapping" means building a compiler using a compiler when you don't have that compiler. As I said elsewhere, compare that to OCaml and GHC, which can be built without downloading OCaml or GHC, respectively.