The janet
binary is built from a janet.c file, but that file is not present in the Janet
repo --- it is generated during the bootstrapping process. That process is described below.
The Janet compiler is written in C, and so you can use gcc (or some other C compiler) to build it, but a substantial number of Janet functions and macros (see src/boot/boot.janet) are implemented in Janet itself.
The "bootstrapper" is the compiled form of boot.c.