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

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.