Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Oct-2024 06:30:18 JST Ludovic Courtès

   • Stefan Monnier
   • Andrius Štikonas
   • Janneke

   “The Design of a Self-Compiling C Transpiler Targeting POSIX Shell” (2024)
   https://doi.org/10.1145/3687997.3695639

   “We have developed pnut, a C to POSIX shell transpiler written in C that generates human-readable shell code. […] Together, pnut and the shell serve as the seed for a chain of builds that create increasingly capable compilers up to the most recent version of [GCC]”

   (@monnier is among the authors 👋)

   Cc: @janneke @stikonas

   #bootstrapping #Guix

   • Alexandre Oliva likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:19 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas

     @stikonas @civodul @monnier that's amazing!

     And I'm sure you won't sacrifice readability, right?

   • Embed this notice
     Andrius Štikonas (stikonas@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:20 JST Andrius Štikonas

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Janneke

     @civodul @janneke @monnier I just realized that I can shrink hex0 from 190 bytes to 182 bytes. So it keeps going down.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrius Štikonas (stikonas@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:22 JST Andrius Štikonas

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Janneke

     @civodul @monnier @janneke Maybe you should start mentioning 190 bytes instead of 357 😀

     https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX/x86/hex0-seed

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:22 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas
     • Janneke

     @stikonas Woow. I thought this had reached a climax but I keep being impressed.

     @janneke @monnier

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:23 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas
     • Janneke

     Anyway, good to see the #bootstrappable community growing with a diversity of options on the table. Let’s talk!

     @monnier @janneke @stikonas

     Janneke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:24 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas
     • Janneke

     I also wonder what makes the authors think “pnut can bootstrap these binaries in fewer steps and less code to audit”.

     The “readable shell” part is questionable to me: I think the right way to frame it is in terms of whether the thing is source code, not whether it’s “readable”—if it’s not source, why even look at it?

     @stikonas @janneke @monnier

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:26 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas
     • Janneke

     The bit about Guix’s full-source bootstrap relying “on a large amount of x86 machine encoding of instructions and assembler code that require experts to audit”, right after mentioning the 357 bytes of x86 instructions, is hard to understand.

     @monnier @janneke @stikonas

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 23:05:27 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Stefan Monnier
     • Andrius Štikonas
     • Janneke

     I have yet to read it carefully but it sure sounds fun!

     @stikonas @janneke @monnier