Bringing up new hardware systems from scratch, by which I mean systems with little or no pre-existing development tools of any kind, can genuinely be truly daunting. This reinforces barrier-to-entry, and makes it difficult for people to explore opportunities to evolve designs in new and interesting ways going forward. Shoehorn is a cross-compiler intended to reduce the strength of these barriers-to-entry. By providing a cross-compiler that can be customized for a particular processor's instruction set architecture or assembler syntax, by a single developer in only a handful of days (instead of months to years), it should be significantly easier to bring up a new computer environment completely from scratch.