What is bootstrapping?

Question

I keep seeing \"bootstrapping\" mentioned in discussions of application development. It seems both widespread and important, but I\'ve yet to come across even a poor explan

Answer 1

In the context of application development, "bootstrapping" usually comes up when talking about modular and/or auto-updatable software.

Rather than the user downloading the entire app, including features he does not need, and re-downloading and manually updating it whenever there is an update, the user only downloads and starts a small "bootstrap" executable, which in turn downloads and installs those parts of the application that the user needs. Additionally, the bootstrap component is able to look for updates and install them each time it is started.

Answer 2

As a humble beginner in the world of programming, and flicking through all the answers here after seeing this word used a lot in apparently slightly different ways in different places, I found reading the Wikipedia page on Bootstrapping (duh! I didn't think of it either at first) is very informative to understand differences in use of this word. Could it be......on extremely rare occasions......Wikipedia might even have better explanations of certain terms than....(redacted)? Will they bring in rep points on Wikipedia though?

To me, it seems all the meanings something to do with: start with something as simple as possible Thing1, make something slightly more complex with that Thing2, and now you can use Thing2 to do some kind of tasks more efficiently and quickly than you could originally with Thing1. Then repeat from Thing2 to Thing 3 ad infinitum...

I see it as closely connected to both biological evolution and 'Layers of Abstraction' (newbies like me see, ahem, Wikipedia, cough) - the evolution from 1940's computers with switches, machine code, Assembly, C, Python, AIs you can give all kinds of complex instructions to like "make the %4^% dinner to my default &^$% requirements and clean the floor you %$£"@:~" in drunken slang English or Amazon tribal dialect without them 'raising an exception' (for newbies again...you guessed it) - missed out lot of links there due to simple ignorance.

Then in certain specific software meanings: Meaning1: Thing1 is used to load latest version of Thing2 (because of course Thing2 will be bigger than Thing1, just as Thing3 will be be bigger than Thing2).

Meaning2: Thing1 is a lower level language (closer to 1001011100....011001 than print("Hello, ", user.name)) used to write a little bit of the higher language of Thing2, then this little bit of Thing2 is used to expand Thing2 itself from baby vocabulary level towards adult vocabulary level (Thing2 starts to be processed, or to use correct technical term 'compiled', by the baby version of itself (it's a clever baby!), whereas the baby version of Thing2 itself could of course only be compiled by Thing1, cause it can't exist before it exists, right duh!), then child version of Thing2 compiles Surly Teenager version of Thing2, at which point programming community decides whether Surly Teenager's 'issues' (software term and metaphor term!) are worth spending enough time resolving to be accepted long term, or to abandon them to (not sure where to take the analogy here).

If yes, then Thing2 has 'Bootstrapped' itself (possibly a few times) from babyhood to adulthood: "the child is the father of the man" (Wordsworth, suggest don't try looking up the quote or the author on Stack Overflow).

Answer 3

For completeness, it is also a rather important (and relatively new) method in statistics that uses resampling / simulation to infer population properties from a sample. It has its own lengthy Wikipedia article on bootstrapping (statistics).

Answer 4

Alex, it's pretty much what your computer does when it boots up. ('Booting' a computer actually comes from the word bootstrapping)

Initially, the small program in your BIOS runs. That contains enough machine code to load and run a larger, more complex program.

That second program is probably something like NTLDR (in Windows) or LILO (in Linux), which then executes and is able to load, then run, the rest of the operating system.

Answer 5

An example of bootstrapping is in some web frameworks. You call index.php (the bootstrapper), and then it loads the frameworks helpers, models, configuration, and then loads the controller and passes off control to it.

As you can see, it's a simple file that starts a large process.

Answer 6

See on the Wikipedia article on bootstrapping.

There is a section and links explaining what it means in Computing. It has four different uses in the field.

Here are some quotes, but for a more in depth explanation, and alternative meanings, consult the links above.

"...is a technique by which a simple computer program activates a more complicated system of programs."

"A different use of the term bootstrapping is to use a compiler to compile itself, by first writing a small part of a compiler of a new programming language in an existing language to compile more programs of the new compiler written in the new language."