miniblog.

Bootstrapping a language can be immensely satisfying. I've added the ability to define stub types in the Garden stdlib and suddenly I don't need to special-case Int or String! They're just normal type declarations.

Bootstrapping a full GCC toolchain from an extremely minimal hex editor has an astounding number of steps: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst I didn't realise just how many tools are self-hosting. Not just GCC, but also flex, bison, automake and even perl!

It's oddly frustrating writing tests for a test library. You want better testing features (hence writing the library), but you have to write tests without them (due to bootstrapping.