snix/notes.org

Bootstrapping, reproducibility, etc.

• Compiler bootstrapping
  • C
  • Haskell
  • Common Lisp
  • Python
• A note on runtimes
  • LLVM
  • JVM
• Resources:
• Slide thoughts:

Compiler bootstrapping

This section contains notes about compiler bootstrapping, the history thereof, which compilers need it - and so on:

C

Haskell

• self-hosted compiler (GHC)

Common Lisp

CL is fairly interesting in this space because it is a language that is defined via an ANSI standard that compiler implementations normally actually follow!

Python

A note on runtimes

Sometimes the compiler just isn't enough …

LLVM

JVM

Resources:

http://bootstrappable.org/

Slide thoughts:

1. Hardware trust has been discussed here a bunch, most recently during the puri.sm talk. Hardware trust is important, as we see with IME, but it's striking that people often take a leap to "I'm now on my trusted Debian with free software". Unless you built it yourself from scratch (Spoiler: you haven't) you're placing trust in what is basically foreign binary blobs. Agenda: Implications/attack vectors of this, state of the chicken & egg, the topic of reproducibility, what can you do? (Nix!)

2. Chicken-and-egg issue

   It's an important milestone for a language to become self-hosted: You begin doing a kind of dogfeeding, you begin to enforce reliability & consistency guarantees to avoid having to redo your own codebase constantly and so on.

   However, the implication is now that you need your own compiler to compile itself.

   Common examples:

   • gcc builds with gcc