live-bootstrap

s GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.

uch a trivial problem? Or better yet, now that you can see how it is done. Could anyone actually produce a C compiler with the same level of functionality in Lisp or FORTH in the same amount of time (or less?). It is easy to talk a big game and words are cheap, we have the entire cc_* family of C compilers written in assembly for multiple architectures and in even cross-platform arrangements. If your language was any good at bootstrapping you'd be able to beat that. Then show your language written in less lines of assembly than cc_x86 to prove the point. Please prove me wrong with working code. Assembly and C have working code good enough to bootstrap GCC+Guile+Linux for more than a year now. https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap https://github.com/oriansj/stage0-posix It is time for Lisp and FORTH to either deliver or learn to stop talking about something they never were good at in the first place and learn to admit Assembly and C won not because "worse is better" but because objectively they are better languages for bootstrapping new and better tools.

y the Bootstrappable Builds project, which aims to build an entire Linux distro starting with only the ~512bytes of machine code in hex0 plus all the necessary source code. https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/ https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 https://ekaitz.elenq.tech/hex0.html https://bootstrappable.org/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... > Which makes me wonder if programs written to be deliberately obfuscated are technically not allowed to be considered free-libre or open source software? Debian definitely rejects such software, I assume the FSF/OSI would too, although they mostly concern themselves with licenses rather than actual software projects. In the past at least 3 times in different FSF/GNU projects, the FSF/GNU project has caused downstream GPL violations due to releases that were missing source code. Even minified JS without the original JS is not considered DFSG-free by Debian, even though it is extremely common these days. Debian applies this rule to all digital files, no matter whether they are programs or fonts or images or videos or other things. Some articles related to this topic: http://www.inventati.org/frx/essays/softfrdm/whatissource.ht... https://b.mtjm.eu/source-code-data-fonts-free-distros.html https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Games/Upstream/#source http://compliance.guide/pristine > programs written to compete in IOCCC The main thing about source code is that downstream users be afforded equality of access to a work as the original author of a work. So if you can write an obfuscated program and realistically modify it yourself without hiding the real source code from users, then that is considered fine from the source code point of view. Of course it is a terrible way to write a program and should get modified to de-obfuscate everything, so more people can understand the code.

ndex_variation... Personally I find the Bootstrappable Builds project way more important and interesting. They are aiming to go from less than 1000 bytes of audited machine code (not assembly) plus all the necessary source code all the way to a full Linux distro. They are impressively far along already. They use multiple techniques for bootstrapping higher levels, including writing new implementations of languages written in other languages, using old versions of languages that were written in other languages etc. Some details here: https://bootstrappable.org/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots... Edit: some talks about bootstrappable: https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/talks.org