Certainly that could be automated quite easily.

I would assume that on such compilation farms that these systems generally use, this could be done very quickly.

Perhaps there would be an interest for the Rustc team to provide a recursive automated setup that is capable of compiling the latest Rustc from OCaml, and finally from C as well since one must follow a similar process with OCaml.

The automation for this is actually trickier than it would first appear: especially with the earlier snapshots, a number of patches are needed to compile the LLVM interfaces written in C++. Also, due to linking issues, some snapshots require a stage2 compiler, while others can only use a stage1 compiler. I agree that it would be trivial once you have the chain in place, but that chain can only be built through trial and error.

And no one has done this before?

Methinks that building this chain by trial and error is rather trivial compared to the actual work in building a compiler.

Guix performed the bootstrap from mrustc 0.8 for rust 1.19 all the way to rust 1.28 in 2018: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/

Since them they've bootstrapped this all the way to 1.50: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

The work done here is non trivial, this chain of versions are required for the final binary to be reproducible.

We are discussing mrustc here. The reason it hasn't been done yet is that nearly everyone interested in this agrees mrustc is a better bootstrapping path than starting from the last OCaml version.

That it's a better bootstrapping process for the user has no relationship with the ease of development for the developer.

Typically, they are inversely correlated.

And when you port to a new CPU architecture you're going to backport those changes to 200 obsolete versions as well?