From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andy Wingo Subject: Re: rust work in progress conflicts Date: Fri, 06 May 2016 11:05:27 +0200 Message-ID: <878tznftew.fsf@igalia.com> References: <20160325184540.4e02cb2d@scratchpost.org> <87k2kq6wma.fsf@grrlz.net> <87oa8mt8lh.fsf@gmail.com> <87lh3obpaz.fsf@gnu.org> <1462459586.3181019.599022233.5F377A74@webmail.messagingengine.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:54458) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aybiP-0000Qe-3b for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 06 May 2016 05:06:35 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aybiD-0001eX-8l for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 06 May 2016 05:06:23 -0400 Received: from pb-sasl1.pobox.com ([64.147.108.66]:52006 helo=sasl.smtp.pobox.com) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aybiB-0001Qj-W7 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 06 May 2016 05:06:17 -0400 In-Reply-To: <1462459586.3181019.599022233.5F377A74@webmail.messagingengine.com> (Alex Griffin's message of "Thu, 05 May 2016 09:46:26 -0500") 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: Alex Griffin Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org On Thu 05 May 2016 16:46, Alex Griffin writes: > On Thu, May 5, 2016, at 08:35 AM, Ludovic Court=C3=A8s wrote: >>=20 >> Yeah it=E2=80=99s OK to do it in the order: write the package bootstrapp= ed from >> the binary blob, and then work on bootstrapping it from OCaml. > > I do not think that bootstrapping Rust from OCaml is a practical goal. > When you guys have talked about bootstrapping gcc from an older version, > I don't think it has involved even a dozen gcc versions, let alone 319! > It's a huge amount of work, to the point where it may even be easier to > write a new Rust compiler from scratch. Even if it succeeded, it would > take over a full week to build the current Rust release, meanwhile OCaml > requires a blob anyway. > > I'd love to be proven wrong, but in any case I don't think it's > reasonable to expect Jelle Licht to take on this project just because he > assumed the mantle of rustc packager. I agree with Alex FWIW. Also FWIW, I think in the future a sane bootstrap is probably more likely from a MIR interpreter (something like this but implemented from another language: https://github.com/tsion/miri/tree/master/src). But given that even OCaml includes a binary blob (!), I don't think that we can practically require bootstrapped language implementations to bootstrap all the way. Andy