Or even, interpreter. It compiles and executes on the fly, in ram, function by function. It doesn't even compile the whole input but just a bit and immediately executes that bit before moving to the next bit, and doesn't save the compilation result anywhere. To me, that's an interpreter.
So it's a c subset interpreter.
And a very cool thing. This is not a denegration or critique at all, just terminology.
I think it's perfectly fine for a bootstrapper to be a drastic subset. They all already are drastically limited in countless other ways anyways like not knowing how to use any of the crazy hardware, networking, etc. A forth bootloader is a full turing language that can eventually do anything, but it itself can do almost nothing initially besides use bios-provided features and start interpreting code which then provides more functionality.
So it's a c subset interpreter.
And a very cool thing. This is not a denegration or critique at all, just terminology.
I think it's perfectly fine for a bootstrapper to be a drastic subset. They all already are drastically limited in countless other ways anyways like not knowing how to use any of the crazy hardware, networking, etc. A forth bootloader is a full turing language that can eventually do anything, but it itself can do almost nothing initially besides use bios-provided features and start interpreting code which then provides more functionality.