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 ≥ 28, is:

1. Build cmd/dist with Go 1.26.0.
2. Using dist, build Go 1.x compiler toolchain and Go 1.x cmd/go (as go_bootstrap) with Go 1.26.0.
3. Using go_bootstrap, rebuild Go 1.x compiler toolchain with itself.
4. Using go_bootstrap, build the remaining Go 1.x standard library and commands.

Because of backward compatibility, although the steps above say Go 1.26.0,
in practice any release ≥ Go 1.26.0 but < Go 1.x will work as the bootstrap base.
Releases ≥ Go 1.x are very likely to work as well.

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