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 explanation of what bootstrapping actually is  rather  it seems as though everyone is just supposed to know what it means   I don t  though   Near as I can figure  it has something to do with initialization tasks required of an application upon launch  but I could be completely wrong about that   Can anyone help me to understand this idea

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Bootstrapping  comes from the term  pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps   That much you can get from Wikipedia   In computing  a bootstrap loader is the first piece of code that runs when a machine starts  and is responsible for loading the rest of the operating system  In modern computers it s stored in ROM  but I recall the bootstrap process on the PDP-11  where you would poke bits via the front-panel switches to load a particular disk segment into memory  and then run it  Needless to say  the bootstrap loader is normally pretty small    Bootstrapping  is also used as a term for building a system using itself -- or more correctly  a predecessor version  For example  ANTLR version 3 is written using a parser developed in ANTLR version 2

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Boot strapping the dictionary meaning is to start up with minimum resources     In the Context of an OS the OS should be able to swiftly load once the Power On   Self Test  POST   determines that its safe to wake up the CPU  The boot strap  code  will be run from the BIOS  BIOS is a small sized ROM  Generally it is a   jump instruction to the set of instructions  which will load the Operating   system to the RAM  The destination of the Jump is the Boot sector in the Hard Disk  Once the bios  program checks it is a valid Boot sector which contains  the starting address of the stored OS  ie whether it is a valid MBR   Master Boot Record  or not  If its a valid MBR the OS will be copied to the   memory  RAM from there on the OS takes care of Memory and Process management

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In terms of it in regards to using the popular Twitter Bootstrap I feel like this type of bootstrapping is the action of integrating a modular component into a Web application without the Web application having to even acknowledge the modular component exists until it needs it or references it    The developer can seamlessly integrate a default copy of the CSS Twitter Bootstrap theme by simply loading  referencing  it into the Web application  Vuola  Then you may need to override some of these changes  but you can do so in such a way that the resource component is untouched and completely reusable    This same concept is how Web Devs implement jQuery APIs and so on  but it s not really expressed by Devs as bootstrapping per se  What it does is it improves flexibility and reusability while allowing the isolation of different components resources of an app to reside freely either on the same server s or possibly on a CDN   NOTE  In computing bootstrapping deals with the MBR and in UNIX it requires a special bootloader or manager which is a small program in ROM that loads the OS into RAM  If you think about it the same concept takes places in the action of the bootstrap loader checking the MBR and loading the OS based on this table which occurs without the OS having any idea that this takes place

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The term  bootstrapping  usually applies to a situation where a system depends on itself to start  sort of a chicken and egg problem   For instance    How do you compile a C compiler written in C  How do you start an OS initialization process if you don t have the OS running yet  How do you start a distributed  peer-to-peer  system where the clients depend on their currently known peers to find out about new peers in the system    In that case  bootstrapping refers to a way of breaking the circular dependency  usually with the help of an external entity  e g    You can use another C compiler to compile  bootstrap  your own compiler  and then you can use it to recompile itself You use a separate piece of code that sets up the initial process  without depending on any functions provided by the OS You use a hard-coded list of initial peers or a hard-coded tracker URL that supplies the peer list   etc

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IMHO there is not a better explanation than the fact about How was the first compiler written   These days the Operating System loading is the most common process referred as Bootstrapping

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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

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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

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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

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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

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As the question is answered  For web develoment  I came so far and found a good explanation about bootsrapping in Laravel doc  Here is the link  In general  we mean registering things  including registering service container bindings  event listeners  middleware  and even routes   hope it will help someone who learning web application development

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I belong to the generation who flipped switches to enter a boot program  In the early 1980s  I worked on a microcomputer called Micro-78  developed by Electronics Corporation of India Ltd  ECIL   It was a sort of clone of Altair 8800  I distinctly remember what happens when a small boot program was entered using the toggle switches and executed by pressing a button  The program reads a second boot program contained in the 1st track of the floppy disk and overwrites it on itself in such a way that the second boot program starts executing to load a disk operating system  I think the term  bootstrap  refers to this process of the first boot program reading and overwriting the second boot program on itself  in a way  pulling itself up  with the additional functionality of the second boot program  That may be the origin of the original meaning of  the bootstrap program

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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  amp     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

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Bootstrapping has yet another meaning in the context of reinforcement learning that may be useful to know for developers  in addition to its use in software development  most answers here  e g  by kdgregory  and its use in statistics as discussed by Dirk Eddelbuettel   From Sutton and Barto      Widrow  Gupta  and Maitra  1973  modified the Least-Mean-Square  LMS    algorithm of Widrow and Hoff  1960  to produce a reinforcement   learning rule that could learn from success and failure signals   instead of from training examples  They called this form of learning      selective bootstrap adaptation    and described it as    learning with a   critic    instead of    learning with a teacher     They analyzed this rule   and showed how it could learn to play blackjack  This was an isolated   foray into reinforcement learning by Widrow  whose contributions to   supervised learning were much more influential    The book describes various reinforcement algorithms where the target value is based on a previous approximation as bootstrap methods      Finally  we note    one last special property of DP  Dynamic Programming  methods  All of them update estimates   of the values of states based on estimates of the values of successor   states  That is  they update estimates on the basis of other   estimates  We call this general idea bootstrapping  Many reinforcement   learning methods perform bootstrapping  even those that do not   require  as DP requires  a complete and accurate model of the   environment    Note that this differs from bootstrap aggregating and intelligence explosion that is mentioned on the wikipedia page on bootstrapping

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

[bootstrapping] What is bootstrapping?

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