Re: Publishing an Official Statement on Self-Hosted Compilers

[John Darrington]

On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:52:32AM -0500, Alex Griffin wrote:
     Hello Guixlings,
     
     One thing I think the Guix project should do is work with the
     reproducible builds folks to publish a document explaining the issues
     involved with self-hosted compilers. It should encourage language
     communities to continuously maintain some way to build their language
     starting from hand-written C source code (or another language which can
     itself be bootstrapped from C). It could also mention that some members
     of our community are exploring ways to bootstrap gcc.
     
     What do you think? It might be a total flop, but it looks like something
     we should try anyway! At the moment I do not see other communities
     talking about this. Guix is deeply concerned about these issues, but
     ultimately we cannot fix everything alone. If we can convince the
     Rust/OCaml/Haskell folks that this is important, we may be able to
     attract a much larger group of people to bear on the problem.
     
     Thanks for your thoughts,

I fully agree.  And like you say, bootstrapping gcc also belongs as part of this
exercise.  In fact I would not stop at C  I think it should be possible to
have traceability to a hand crafted assembler.

J'

-- 
Avoid eavesdropping.  Send strong encryted email.
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://sks-keyservers.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature