HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
ludocode
onramp
C2024–2026
ludocode / onramp

onramp

A portable self-bootstrapping C compiler

Languages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
8Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
231GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A portable self-bootstrapping C compiler

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I'm the author of Onramp. Thanks for linking it! One of the VMs I wrote for Onramp is in POSIX shell [1]. This was intended to make C bootstrappable on any POSIX system of any…

ludocode used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2024-03-30 14:31:42 UTC to 2026-04-03 15:32:59 UTC.

0122024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMar 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMar 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsApr 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20252025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20252025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20252025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Oct 20252025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Nov 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20252025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20262026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

8 sources
ludocode·Apr 3, 2026Recommendation phrase
I'm the author of Onramp. Thanks for linking it! One of the VMs I wrote for Onramp is in POSIX shell [1]. This was intended to make C bootstrappable on any POSIX system of any architecture with nothing besides the shell. Unfortunately it's about 100,000x too slow to be useful. It's also at least as complicated as a machine code VM. I've since mostly abandoned the POSIX shell idea. Onramp does have a very simple C89 VM though, and its purpose is for bootstrapping modern C on systems that have only a basic C compiler [2]. So this c89cc.sh could in theory work. I tried it and unfortunately it doesn't quite compile yet (and doesn't give a comprehensible error message either.) Even if it worked, c89cc.sh only compiles to x86_64 ELF, and it's way more complicated than the x86_64 ELF machine code Onramp VM [3]. This has been a bit of a recurring
Read the rest
theme with Onramp: anything I've tried to get away from the initial machine code stages ends up being more complicated than handwritten machine code. Still, it's nice to have a lot of different ways to bootstrap. I love seeing projects like this and I'm glad to see more people taking bootstrapping seriously. [1]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/... [2]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/... [3]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/...
In C89cc.sh – standalone C89/ELF64 compiler in pure portable shell
ludocode·Sep 3, 2025
Indeed, a decent closed hash table is maybe 30 lines. An open hash table with linear probing is even less, especially if you don't need to remove entries. It's almost identical to a linear search through an array; you just change where you start iterating. In my first stage Onramp linker [1], converting linear search to an open hash table adds a grand total of 24 bytecode instructions, including the FNV-1a hash function. There's no reason to ever linear search a symbol table. [1]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/core/ld/0-gl...
In Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python (2023)
ludocode·Aug 26, 2024
It can be difficult to explain why bootstrapping is important. I put a "Why?" section in the README of my own bootstrapping compiler [0] for this reason. Security is a big reason and it's one the bootstrappable team tend to focus on. In order to avoid the trusting trust problem and other attacks (like the recent xz backdoor), we need to be able to bootstrap everything from pure source code. They go as far as deleting all pre-generated files to ensure that they only rely on things that are hand-written and auditable. So bootstrapping Python for example is pretty complicated because the source contains code generated by Python scripts. I'm much more interested in the cultural preservation aspect of it. We want to preserve contemporary media for future archaeologists, for example in the Arctic World Archive [1]. Unfortunately it's pointless
Read the rest
if they have no way to decode it. So what do we do? We can preserve the specs, but we can't really expect them to implement x265 and everything else they would need from scratch. We can preserve binaries, but then they'd need to either get thousand-year-old hardware running or virtualize a thousand-year-old CPU. We can give them, say, a definition of a simple Lisp, and then give them code that runs on that, but then who's going to implement x265 in a basic Lisp? None of this is really practical. That's why in my project I made a simple virtual machine, then bootstrapped C on top of it. It's trivially portable, not just to present-day architectures but to future and alien architectures as well. Any future archaeologist or alien civilization could implement the VM in a day, then run the C bootstrap on it, then compile ffmpeg or whatever and decode our media. There are no black boxes here: it's all debuggable, auditable, open, handwritten source code. [0]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp?tab=readme-ov-file#why-bo... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive
In Writing a Rust compiler in C
ludocode·Mar 30, 2024
The team at bootstrappable.org have been working very hard at creating compilers that can bootstrap from scratch to prevent this kind of attack (the "trusting trust" attack is another name for it.) They've gotten to the point where they can bootstrap in freestanding so they don't need to trust any OS binaries anymore (see builder-hex0.) I've spent a lot of my spare time the past year or so working on my own attempt at a portable bootstrappable compiler. It's partly to prevent this attack, and also partly so that future archaeologists can easily bootstrap C even if their computer architectures can't run any binaries from the present day. https://github.com/ludocode/onramp It's nowhere near done but I'm starting a new job soon so I felt like I needed to publish what I have. It does at least bootstrap from handwritten x86_64 machine code up
Read the rest
to a compiler for most of C89, and I'm working on the final stage that will hopefully be able to compile TinyCC and other similar C compilers soon.
In The Ken Thompson Hack

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.