Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping alludes to a German legend about a Baron Münchhausen, who was able to lift himself out of a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair. In later versions he was using his own boot straps to pull himself out of the sea which gave rise to the term .

Computing

Bootstrapping is generally a longer term for booting, or the process of starting up any computer. "Bootstrap" most commonly refers to the program that actually begins the initialization of the computer's operating system, like GRUB, LILO or NTLDR. Modern personal computers have the ability of using their network interface card (NIC) for bootstrapping, on IA-32(x86) and IA-64(Itanium) this method is implemented by PXE and Etherboot.

Related Topics:
Booting - GRUB - LILO - NTLDR - Personal computers - Network interface card - IA-32 - X86 - IA-64 - Itanium - PXE - Etherboot

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Bootstrapping can also refer to the development of successively more complex programming environments. The simplest environment will be, perhaps, a very basic text editor (e.g. ed) and an assembler program. Using these tools, one can write a more complex text editor, and a simple compiler for a higher-level language and so on, until one can have a graphical IDE and an extremely high-level programming language.

Related Topics:
Ed - Assembler - Graphical - IDE - High-level programming language

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Compilers

In compiler design, a bootstrap or bootstrapping compiler is a compiler that is written in the target language that it compiles. Examples include gcc and PL/I.

Related Topics:
Compiler - Gcc - PL/I

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:For more detail, see Bootstrapping (compilers)

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