This is a practical example of bootstrapping a minimal machine into an interpreter for a high level language. As I remember it being taught to me the importanc

This is a practical example of bootstrapping a minimal machine into an interpreter for a high level language. As I remember it being taught to me the importance of being able to do this — with a Turing machine, lambda calculus, etc. — is to show that the high level language is equivalent to the fundamental language and therefore whatever can be reasoned about the former can be applied to the latter. The first and only example I can think of is the halting problem. On a practical scale one might prove that the base language doesn’t have memory leaks, so neither can the derived language? What are the advantages of bootstrapping like this? If the answer is simply another form of “because it’s there” (Mallory, re climbing Everest) then I respect that!