From: Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com>
To: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>,
Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz>,
help-guix@gnu.org
Subject: Re: How to add /bin/sh to the build environment
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2021 20:36:08 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <8433ab7e-1540-37ff-e647-8e8da01e07fb@philipmcgrath.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YYmjbxVwrZVTMSJ4@jasmine.lan>
(I wrote my earlier reply before I saw Leo's.)
On 11/8/21 17:23, Leo Famulari wrote:
> It will be necessary to fix this issue in the SML/NJ package definition
> (I think you've done this in a followup patch)
Is this <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/38606>, or somewhere else?
> Guix does not
> accept packages that rely on pre-built binaries — everything must be
> built from source code. There are some exceptions but I don't think that
> SML/NJ will qualify due to its obscurity compared to other language
> implementations. If SML/NJ cannot be built without the binary bootfiles,
> it probably won't be eligible for inclusion in GNU Guix.
Mostly I wanted to follow up to say that, from my perspective, SML/NJ is
a very noteworthy and influential language implementation. Perhaps the
most familiar example for Guix folks would be that Guile's fibers are
based on Concurrent ML, which is an SML/NJ extension:
https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/29/a-new-concurrent-ml
Personally I've only read ML, not written it, but from a Debian bug I
found through searching online
(<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=220046>), it appears
that there are no known Standard ML implementations that avoid this
bootstrapping problem. SML/NJ, in addition to being one of the most
important implementations in its own right, is apparently capable of
bootstrapping at least one other implementation, MLton. (Unlike some on
that thread, I don't consider the 5x slowdown for the bootstrap build to
be prohibitive: bootstrapping Chez Scheme via Racket has a 10x slowdown.)
It is very valuable that Guix maintains such high standards for
bootstrapping from source. However, Guix does still contain some
compilers that have bootstrapping limitations. SML/NJ is no worse that
Chez Scheme in this respect, and comparably important. (One difference
is that there is a path to backporting the bootstrap simulation from
Racket's fork to the upstream variant, which would remove the
problem---but I don't that wasn't true when Chez Scheme was first added
to Guix.) The status quo is that no Standard ML language implementation
at all seems to be in Guix. I think including SML/NJ would be better
than waiting for someone to write a hypothetical Standard ML compiler in
a host language with a better bootstrapping story.
-Philip
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-09 1:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-08 9:25 How to add /bin/sh to the build environment Foo Chuan Wei
2021-11-08 16:54 ` Xinglu Chen
2021-11-08 20:19 ` Foo Chuan Wei
2021-11-08 22:23 ` Leo Famulari
2021-11-09 1:36 ` Philip McGrath [this message]
2021-11-09 3:51 ` Foo Chuan Wei
2021-11-10 1:41 ` Leo Famulari
2021-11-08 22:58 ` Philip McGrath
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