Reminds me of compiler bootstrapping. If you only have the source code of, let's say, Rust and want to build it you first need to have a Rust compiler of a previous version. And for that you need another compiler. Then you reach times when rustc was written in OCaml. And know what? Now you need to build OCaml compiler!

Other way is to build a stripped down version of rustc only capable of compiling latest rustc, e.g. using https://github.com/dtolnay/bootstrap

Great post on bootstrapping and its problems: https://bootstrappable.org/

Actual project capable of bootstrapping Linux system from scratch: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap