Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ReactiveJelly 1959 days ago
Only if you don't consider time, or optional dependencies. GCC 10 _can_ be built with GCC 10, but it was probably built with GCC 9 the first time around.

If you can bootstrap it, and you can, then it's not really a hard, unbreakable cycle, right? It's just an option that's quicker than starting from tcc or whatever every time.
1 comments
nyberg 1959 days ago
But how would you build the first GCC in that chain?
link
pjmlp 1959 days ago
Using another C compiler, if none exists, create one in Assembly or other programming language in the target platform and go from there.
link
joshuaissac 1958 days ago
TCC 0.9.27 can build GCC 2.95.3. You can build TCC using GNU Mes, which itself can be built using M2-Planet, which is written in a subset of C.

https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

link
fosslinux 1958 days ago
Furthermore, M2-Planet can be built by another C compiler written in assembly, all the way down to hex instructions.

https://github.com/oriansj/mescc-tools-seed/

link
pabs3 1958 days ago
These projects are from the Bootstrappable Builds folks:

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/

link