Re:Bootstrapping Rust
by jensnockert on Thursday December 11, 2014 @03:53AM
(#8733841)
Cross-compilation is functional, and it's how you would bootstrap it. But in theory you could also bootstrap from the old compiler written in ocaml, but that would take ages due to needing a gazillion builds of rustc.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
We can determine exactly how many builds you'd need by looking at the master snapshot file: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/snapshots....
According to this, there have been 290 snapshots in total. And keep in mind that you would also need to rebuild LLVM quite a few times as well during this process, as Rust has continually upgraded its custom LLVM fork over the years.