From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alex Griffin Subject: Publishing an Official Statement on Self-Hosted Compilers Date: Thu, 05 May 2016 09:52:32 -0500 Message-ID: <1462459952.3184683.599099897.2F5459D9@webmail.messagingengine.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:35828) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ayKeW-0000ig-7q for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 05 May 2016 10:53:26 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ayKeK-0005dB-Js for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 05 May 2016 10:53:14 -0400 Received: from out5-smtp.messagingengine.com ([66.111.4.29]:53286) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ayKeI-0005Su-1X for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 05 May 2016 10:53:08 -0400 Received: from compute3.internal (compute3.nyi.internal [10.202.2.43]) by mailout.nyi.internal (Postfix) with ESMTP id 604D5210AF for ; Thu, 5 May 2016 10:52:54 -0400 (EDT) List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: guix-devel@gnu.org Hello Guixlings, One thing I think the Guix project should do is work with the reproducible builds folks to publish a document explaining the issues involved with self-hosted compilers. It should encourage language communities to continuously maintain some way to build their language starting from hand-written C source code (or another language which can itself be bootstrapped from C). It could also mention that some members of our community are exploring ways to bootstrap gcc. What do you think? It might be a total flop, but it looks like something we should try anyway! At the moment I do not see other communities talking about this. Guix is deeply concerned about these issues, but ultimately we cannot fix everything alone. If we can convince the Rust/OCaml/Haskell folks that this is important, we may be able to attract a much larger group of people to bear on the problem. Thanks for your thoughts, -- Alex Griffin