Comment by 15155

2 years ago

At 357 bytes, do you need a reproducible binary at all?

I'd think one could hand-document all 357 bytes of machine code and have them be intelligible.

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15155

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jowea  2 years ago

This[0] is basically the hand-documentation of those bytes then. Handwritten ELF header and assembly code.

[0] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...

  • ralferoo  2 years ago

    Just had a read of this to see what it did... And I must admit, I don't understand what purpose this is supposed to serve.

    All it seems to do is convert hex into binary and dump it to a file. Not sure how that's any more useful than just copying the binary for next stage directly, after all this binary had to get on the system somehow.

    • rssoconnor  2 years ago

      The program does also dispose of comment lines.

      One could argue that this is just a kind of trick so they can say the next "binary" is actually a "source" file because it happens to be written by a human in ASCII.

      Still the phase distinction between what is a source and what is a binary becomes blurry at this low level. I believe the next stage of compiling is to, writing in ASCII represented machine code with comments, to allow for the existence of labels and then compute offsets for jumps to labels. And then more and more features are added until you have a minimal assembler letting you write somewhat machine independent code, and then continuing to work you way up the toolchain.

      So at which point does the translation from "source" to "binary" become a real thing and not just a trick of semantics? Is it when we have a machine independent assembly code? Is it when we computed offsets for labelled jumps? It is when we started stripping comments out of the source code?

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