3 ms·

This is true of a lot of languages, go, haskell (even more once shake becomes the build system for it) etc... It makes porting things... interesting.

• steveklabnik 9y ago
  Usually you port by cross compiling an initial compiler, and bootstrapping from there.
  • binarycrusader 9y ago
    Speaking from personal experience, that can be quite painful. Being able to build rust and cargo, even if only for bootstrapping when porting, would truly be a wondrous thing.
    • fmap 9y ago
      Why, we could always use emscripten to compile rustc to JavaScript and use that for bootstrapping! On a more serious note, ghc at least solved this problem by allowing you to compile Haskell to C (-fvia-C). Writing a naive C code generator from whatever your backend is using is probably not that hard.
      • mitchty 9y ago
        I actually did steveklabnik said porting ghc to alpine linux. Lets just say, ghc's cross compilation can be frustrating.
        • mitchty 9y ago
          Forgot a what in there, just woke up me can not english.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Or by making use of an interpreter as first stage.
• Kubuxu 9y ago
  Go bootstrap uses Go1.4 which compiler is written in C. So: compile Go1.4 and use that to compile the Go 1.X compiler (I don't know but multiple steps might be necessary).