Bootstrapping can also get recursive, eg. GCC and binutils are bootstrapped by compiling their sources with the GCC you already have on your build system; the r

Bootstrapping can also get recursive, eg. GCC and binutils are bootstrapped by compiling their sources with the GCC you already have on your build system; the result of this is an intermediary compiler, which is then used to compile the sources of itself again. (I should look up the following bit, but IIRC, the second generation result compiles the sources a third time, and the last two outputs are compared -- they should be equal, barring any non-deterministic optimizations.)