This program, dist, is the bootstrapping tool for the Go distribution.

As of Go 1.5, dist and other parts of the compiler toolchain are written in Go, making bootstrapping a little more involved than in the past. The approach is to build the current release of Go with an earlier one.

The process to install Go 1.x, for x ≥ 22, is:

1. Build cmd/dist with Go 1.20.6.
2. Using dist, build Go 1.x compiler toolchain with Go 1.20.6.
3. Using dist, rebuild Go 1.x compiler toolchain with itself.
4. Using dist, build Go 1.x cmd/go (as go_bootstrap) with Go 1.x compiler toolchain.
5. Using go_bootstrap, build the remaining Go 1.x standard library and commands.

Because of backward compatibility, although the steps above say Go 1.20.6, in practice any release ≥ Go 1.20.6 but < Go 1.x will work as the bootstrap base. Releases ≥ Go 1.x are very likely to work as well.

See https://go.dev/s/go15bootstrap for more details about the original bootstrap and https://go.dev/issue/54265 for details about later bootstrap version bumps.