[laurenth]

A shell is almost always used to setup the bootstrap environment, so the dependency on a shell is more or less always there.

Otherwise, something special with POSIX shell is its large number of independent implementations, making it the ideal starting point for diverse double-compilation (https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.5534). The idea is to bootstrap a toolchain from multiple compilers (shells in this case), and the result compared to verify that no shell introduced a trusting trust attack.