This Forth use of the term metacompiler is disputed in mainstream computer science. See Forth (programming language) and History of compiler construction. The actual Forth process of compiling itself is a combination of a Forth being a self-hosting extensible programming language and sometimes cross compilation, long established terminology in computer science. Metacompilers are a general compiler writing system. Besides the Forth metacompiler concept being indistinguishable from self-hosting and extensible language. The actual process acts at a lower level defining a minimum subset of forth "words", that can be used to define additional forth words, A full Forth implementation can then be defined from the base set. This sounds like a bootstrap process. The problem is that almost every general purpose language compiler also fits the Forth metacompiler description.