4 ms·

Personally I feel like we're missing something (and I did read the article, for the record). I suspect the problem is that they either cannot produce a Rust cro

by DSMan195276 5y ago

Personally I feel like we're missing something (and I did read the article, for the record). I suspect the problem is that they either cannot produce a Rust cross-compiler (but I think that exists?), or such a compiler cannot compile Rust itself correctly for some reason. So in your case, I guess you must not be able to create a `wasm` version of Rust that is capable of compiling the Rust compiler to native code on whatever platform you picked. Otherwise your logic is basically how other compilers get bootstrapped, just replace `wasm` with some other already-supported platform like x86 - Produce an x86 to ARCH cross-compiler and compile the compiler with the new cross-compiler. The result is a compiler that runs on ARCH.

comex 5y ago
What you're missing is, mainly, the so-called "Trusting Trust" attack, where a compiler is backdoored such that whenever it's used to compile another compiler, the same backdoor is inserted into that compiler. Thus even assuming good intentions on the part of the current Rust maintainers, a backdoor could hypothetically have been inserted into version X's official compiler binaries at some point, which then infected version X+1, which infected version X+2, and so on. I say hypothetically, because IIRC Rust's bootstrap chain has been replicated, including with mrustc, resulting in identical binaries. There is absolutely no need to re-replicate it on every random architecture. (And even if you did want to do so, qemu already exists and can emulate x86, though wasm might be slightly faster.) But some people have strange ideas about how bootstrapping ought to work...
- DSMan195276 5y ago
  Ah, I didn't catch the part of the article that pointed out not relying on existing compilers was an explicit goal (Which probably should have been obvious in hindsight). To each his own, it's still a fun project if not particularly practical. But that makes sense then that this probably isn't the only way to bootstrap Rust onto a new architecture.

comex 5y ago

What you're missing is, mainly, the so-called "Trusting Trust" attack, where a compiler is backdoored such that whenever it's used to compile another compiler, the same backdoor is inserted into that compiler. Thus even assuming good intentions on the part of the current Rust maintainers, a backdoor could hypothetically have been inserted into version X's official compiler binaries at some point, which then infected version X+1, which infected version X+2, and so on. I say hypothetically, because IIRC Rust's bootstrap chain has been replicated, including with mrustc, resulting in identical binaries. There is absolutely no need to re-replicate it on every random architecture. (And even if you did want to do so, qemu already exists and can emulate x86, though wasm might be slightly faster.) But some people have strange ideas about how bootstrapping ought to work...

DSMan195276 5y ago
Ah, I didn't catch the part of the article that pointed out not relying on existing compilers was an explicit goal (Which probably should have been obvious in hindsight). To each his own, it's still a fun project if not particularly practical. But that makes sense then that this probably isn't the only way to bootstrap Rust onto a new architecture.