Comment by fjfaase
1 day ago
In fact the MES-compiler, the one that I want to replace, is written in Scheme. It also comes with a Scheme interpreter written in C. Before the MES-compiler can be executed the source has to be unzipped and unpacked with two programs that are also compiled from C sources. So, you already need a compiler that supports a sizable subset of C to compile all these programs in order to compile the MES-compiler, which is a rather compliant C-compiler, which is used to compile the Tiny C Compiler and a standard library (included in the MES sources). The unzip and untar programs are also needed to unpack/zip the archive with the Tiny C Compiler sources.
Once everything is unpacked, are the resulting compiler materials sufficient to compile and run those packing and unpacking programs?
I am not sure if follow you completely. Yes, I guess it is the case, but what is the use? Before you can compile the Tiny C Compiler, you already need to unpack the .tar.gz file containing the sources. The sources for ungz and untar
So, you need a minimal C compiler that can also compile the ungz and untar programs from their C sources. At the moment, I have a minimal C compiler that can compile the Tiny C Compiler and the standard library that is part of the GNU Mes compiler. One of the following tasks will be to see if it can also compile the sources for ungz and untar, which can be found in [0]. I think it will be not so hard as these sources already have been adapted to be compiled with a minimal C compiler.
[0] https://github.com/oriansj/mescc-tools-extra
Super fascinating stuff! I love these kind of stuff. Genuinely reading comments like yours really cheer me up in a way
I had this thought once that there would be a single sd card or hard drive which would allow bootstrapping source and a hash and with systems like tor and torrenting in general combining with self hosted wikipedia perhaps and all the mirrors of open source software I use.
I had this idea that its now possible to have such hard drives if I so desire and I am not usually paranoid but in actuality, feats like bootstrappability remove paranoia because I feel like there must be other people who do this and who verify security and I can always go to them or they exist :)
Bootstrappability is really cool and awesome stuff in my opinion which is severely underrated by many and I am glad that people like you work in helping bootstrappability. Have a nice day!
Regarding the comment itself, I didn't know that this was the case of Mes as I had just thought the only thing it depends on is scheme but thanks for sharing information about this.