[ale] RH 7.0 wth boraken compiler

[Dan Newcombe]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Chris Fowler wrote:
> I appreciate yor ur email and clarification.  Could you explain to me what
> bootstraping the compiler means.  Basically I'm working on an embedded

You have an OS...you want GCC on it, but all you have is the piece-of-junk
compiler that came with the OS.  This compiler is usually provided with
the OS for the sole purpose of being able to relink the kernel or for
doing Hello World programs. 

GCC can use the most pathetic compiler (without ANSI prototyping and other
standards built into it) to build a tiny version of itself that can then
build the whole GCC compiler.  This is the bootstrapping - getting
something on a machine which doesn't really have the full means to get it
there.

With GCC, if you build from the ground up, you build a stage1 compiler.
This is the compiler that the OS compiler builds, then you use that stage1
compiler to build the full-blown stage2 compiler, which is gcc.  And if
you are real paranoid and have extra cycles, you use the stage2 compiler
to build a stage3 compiler, which is the same as the stage2 one, it's just
compiled with the full gcc instead of the stage1 mini-gcc.

The easier method is to just download a pre-built version of gcc for your
platform!

Linux is semi-immune from this problem, as it comes with a full-blown
compiler unlike many comercial Unices.


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