[jballanc]

Right, but if someone surreptitiously deleted all Go compiler binaries from the world, then we'd have to go back to compiling the C source of 1.4...

Of course, that's the nature of bootstrapping! If someone managed to erase all the software from all the computers in the world, we'd have to go back and find an "Old world" Mac and use the on-die Forth compiler to write a C compiler so we could start compiling things again.

[andrewchambers]

Provided people didn't forget. Recreating from memory will take a fraction of the time. I would go for a lisp interpreter in assembly then implement a c compiler in that.

[rsc]

Yes, and thanks to version control that would take, what, maybe a few minutes?

[ufo]

Not if all the binaries for the version control systems also go missing :)