How are the “primitive” types defined non-recursively?

Question

Since a struct in C# consists of the bits of its members, you cannot have a value type T which includes any T fields:

Answer 1

As far as I know, within a field signature that is stored in an assembly, there are certain hardcoded byte patterns representing the 'core' primitive types - the signed/unsigned integers, and floats (as well as strings, which are reference types and a special case). The CLR knows natively how to deal with those. Check out Partition II, section 23.2.12 of the CLR spec for the bit patterns of the signatures.

Within each primitive struct ([mscorlib]System.Int32, [mscorlib]System.Single etc) in the BCL is a single field of that native type, and because a struct is exactly the same size as its constituent fields, each primitive struct is the same bit pattern as its native type in memory, and so can be interpreted as either, by the CLR, C# compiler, or libraries using those types.

From C#, int, double etc are synonyms of the mscorlib structs, which each have their primitive field of a type that is natively recognised by the CLR.

(There's an extra complication here, in that the CLR spec specifies that any types that have a 'short form' (the native CLR types) always have to be encoded as that short form (int32), rather than valuetype [mscorlib]System.Int32. So the C# compiler knows about the primitive types as well, but I'm not sure of the exact semantics and special-casing that goes on in the C# compiler and CLR for, say, method calls on primitive structs)

So, due to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, there has to be something 'outside' the system by which it can be defined. This is the Magic that lets the CLR interpret 4 bytes as a native int32 or an instance of [mscorlib]System.Int32, which is aliased from C#.