Status and rationale for toplevel bootstrap (was Re: Example of debugging GCC with toplevel bootstrap)

[Richard Kenner]

    Well, right, those languages have front-ends written in C.

That's not the main difference, which is that for the other languages, you
can compile programs without an RTS since it's just used when the user
explicitly calls a library.  But you cannot compile *any* Ada program (even
an empty function) without an RTS in the path since it makes builtin
references to the RTS.