Talk:Bootstrapping (computing)

Really need some grammatical overhaul. "Bootstrapping is not so magical"... really now? 129.118.97.73 (talk) 20:30, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I am a college student at fresno state university and i have just did a bootstrap paper based upon several references and sources. use whatever you like from this information. It needs some wikifying but i dont have time to do this. Please can someone do this for me? I just wanted to contribute because this process has not really been defined well in wikipedia in a large amount of detail. thank you.

Very nice paper, but I don't think that it offers anything useful to the bootstrapping page for these reasons: 1) It is only loosely associated with bootstraping. 2) It is poorly written (don't take offence) 3) It offers little or no information that is of any interest to anybody interesting in bootstrapping specifically. 4) It is full of irrelevant information. Therefore, I am re-removing the paper.

Bootstrapping may also refer to the process or starting a decentralized (p2p) network. A node joining the network needs some kind of bootstrap to find other peers. Yet another usage is in security: you need a starting point to establish a « web of trust » (as described by Thompson in is classical paper http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/ but that can be extended to SSL certificates and PGP keys). I may write a paragraph about that later.

I deleted the "learning" section (so called 0.632 bootstrapping) as it was obviously not related to the rest of the topic except in name. The section contained technical terms that were left entirely unexplained, and was therefore of no use to anyone. Unless it gets its own wikipedia lemma containing useful information, this should not be featured. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.101.8.122 (talk) 21:28, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

cross-compilers?

 * Historically, bootstrapping also refers to early computer program development which has been obviated by emulation software now executed in pre-existing computers. Bootstrapping in program development began during the 1950s when each program was constructed on paper in decimal code or in binary code, bit by bit (1s and 0s), because there was no high-level computer language, no compiler, no assembler, and no linker.

Unsure here why the page mentions emulation (use of one system to step through instructions intended for some other, dissimilar machine) but does not mention cross-compilers (compilers which run on one type of computer but generate code which only can be run on some other dissimilar computer - for instance a desktop PC being used to compile code for embedded controllers or personal digital assistants). I'd suspect that creation of a cross-assembler or cross-compiler would be one of the first steps taken when trying to get some new and fully-incompatible processor to do anything useful. --carlb (talk) 06:50, 15 February 2008 (UTC)