LUludocode·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
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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