Re: Re-using bootstrap in the half-strap

[Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@gnu.org>]

Hello,

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> writes:

> A thought this morning... one challenge with Guile's 2.1 branch is it
> takes a lonnnng time to bootstrap.  There are good reasons for this, and
> Andy Wingo has documented them:
>
>   http://wingolog.org/archives/2016/01/11/the-half-strap-self-hosting-and-guile
>
> However, I can't help but wonder if we could reuse the initial
> bootstrapped compiler.  What if we had an external package that
> contained *just* the scheme interpreter used to bootstrap the rest of
> the system?  We might not need to separate the codebase, but have this
> be a separate make output.
>
> If you could package *just* the bootstrapped compiler, if a user doesn't
> feel like waiting through the whole bootstrap process, they could use
> the existing bootstrap package, like:
>
>   ./configure --with-bootstrap=/path/to/guile-bootstrap
>
> and maybe we could have a guile-bootstrap package in guix, etc.  If you
> want to do the whole bootstrap yourself in the Guile package, you could
> do so, but it wouldn't be a requirement, assuming you had that separate
> package...
>
> Thoughts?  Useful?  Badly informed?
>  - Chris

I feel the same way.  I don't know about the technical details, but
such convenience would be more than welcome.

Thanks,

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin