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Bootstrapping (compilers)

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In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler (or assembler) in the source programming language that it intends to compile. Applying this technique leads to a self-hosting compiler. An initial minimal core version of the compiler is generated in a different language (which could be assembly language); from that point, successive expanded versions of the compiler are run using the minimal core of the language.

Contents

Many compilers for many programming languages are bootstrapped, including compilers for BASIC, Algol, C, D, Pascal, PL/I, Factor, Haskell, Modula-2, Oberon, OCaml, Common Lisp, Scheme, Go, Java, Rust, Python, Scala, Nim, Eiffel, and more.

Advantages

Bootstrapping a compiler has the following advantages:

  • it is a non-trivial test of the language being compiled, and as such is a form of dogfooding.
  • compiler developers only need to know the language being compiled.
  • compiler development can be done in the higher level language being compiled.
  • improvements to the compiler's back-end improve not only general purpose programs but also the compiler itself.
  • it is a comprehensive consistency check as it should be able to reproduce its own object code.

    • The chicken and egg problem

    If one needs to obtain a compiler for language X (which is written in language X), there is the issue of how the first compiler can be written. The different methods that are used in practice to solving this chicken or the egg problem include:

  • Implementing an interpreter or compiler for language X in language Y. Niklaus Wirth reported that he wrote the first Pascal compiler in Fortran.
  • Another interpreter or compiler for X has already been written in another language Y; this is how Scheme is often bootstrapped.
  • Earlier versions of the compiler were written in a subset of X for which there existed some other compiler; this is how some supersets of Java, Haskell, and the initial Free Pascal compiler are bootstrapped.
  • A compiler supporting non-standard language extensions or optional language features can be written without using those extensions and features, to enable it being compiled with another compiler supporting the same base language but a different set of extensions and features. The main parts of the C++ compiler clang were written in a subset of C++ that can be compiled by both g++ and Microsoft Visual C++. Advanced features are written with some GCC extensions.
  • The compiler for X is cross compiled from another architecture where there exists a compiler for X; this is how compilers for C are usually ported to other platforms. Also this is the method used for Free Pascal after the initial bootstrap.
  • Writing the compiler in X; then hand-compiling it from source (most likely in a non-optimized way) and running that on the code to get an optimized compiler. Donald Knuth used this for his WEB literate programming system.

    • Methods for distributing compilers in source code include providing a portable bytecode version of the compiler, so as to bootstrap the process of compiling the compiler with itself. The T-diagram is a notation used to explain these compiler bootstrap techniques. In some cases, the most convenient way to get a complicated compiler running on a system that has little or no software on it involves a series of ever more sophisticated assemblers and compilers.

    History

    Assemblers were the first language tools to bootstrap themselves.

    The first high level language to provide such a bootstrap was NELIAC in 1958. The first widely used languages to do so were Burroughs B5000 Algol in 1961 and LISP in 1962.

    Hart and Levin wrote a LISP compiler in LISP at MIT in 1962, testing it inside an existing LISP interpreter. Once they had improved the compiler to the point where it could compile its own source code, it was self-hosting.

    The compiler as it exists on the standard compiler tape is a machine language program that was obtained by having the S-expression definition of the compiler work on itself through the interpreter.

    This technique is only possible when an interpreter already exists for the very same language that is to be compiled. It borrows directly from the notion of running a program on itself as input, which is also used in various proofs in theoretical computer science, such as the proof that the halting problem is undecidable.

    List of languages having self-hosting compilers

    The following programming languages have self-hosting compilers:

    References

    Bootstrapping (compilers) Wikipedia
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