A while back I read Christophe Rhodes's paper “SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp” which describes SBCL's bootstrap procedures.

The paper includes a bunch of diagrams for each build stage. These were pretty helpful in improving my understanding of the build process. So, I tried to take them a step further and create a single diagram that provides a global overview of the build process:

I'm interested in hearing any comments you might have. If you already know how the build process works, does it make you cringe? If you are vaguely familiar with (parts of) the process, does it provide you with some sort of new insight? Given that I haven't included a legend, does it make any sense at all?