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How did they get the original C compiler there then without allowing binaries? Did they originally write one in assembler? I remember reading an interesting th
by Blikkentrekker 6y ago
How did they get the original C compiler there then without allowing binaries? Did they originally write one in assembler?
I remember reading an interesting thought experiment that traced history that investigated what would happen if Dennis Ritchie had put malicious code in the first C compiler that was designed to detect whether the compiler compiled a compiler, and then copied the malicious code into it.
It concluded that tracing the history, that if this were to have happened, then GCC and Clang and many other programming languages would have said malicious code in their compilers that do not show up in the source code with none the wiser.
- monocasa 6y agoEpoch creation is covered by a totally different set of process rules, for the reasons you've stated. These rules are mainly intended to make it much harder for someone to gain access to the system if they weren't there when the system initially was blocked off from the world.
- twic 6y agoIf understand Dennis Ritchie's explanation [1] correctly, he started with a compiler for the B language, itself written in B, and modified it to accept a somewhat different language, which he called C. Before the B compiler written in B, there was a B compiler written in something else. I couldn't figure out what from that document. [1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html