Re: Publishing an Official Statement on Self-Hosted Compilers

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:52:32AM -0500, Alex Griffin wrote:
> 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
> 

It's not something I had really thought of before, with the focus being
on reproducable building of packages. It doesn't take much, though, to
realize that you have to start from somewhere to get reproducable and
trustable binaries. While it's easy to throw up your hands and say "its
turtles all the way down," the more the turtles rest on C's turtles the
better.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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