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> we really do rely on the hope that our compilers are pure Jeremiah Orians hacked his way through the whole supply chain up to raw machine code to get a prova

by pxc 3y ago

> we really do rely on the hope that our compilers are pure Jeremiah Orians hacked his way through the whole supply chain up to raw machine code to get a provably clean, up-to-date GCC for Linux on amd64¹, solving the bootstrapping problem in a complete way. He and some Guix people have also then worked to integrate this into GNU Guix (a cross-distro package manager) and GuixSD (a GNU operating system based on that package manager), so it's actually not too hard to make practical use of that work, either! Imo, this is an incredible achievement that deserves much wider recognition. It must have taken a very principled, curious, obsessive, stubborn personality to even seriously take up this work. Pretty damn cool that it even happened. -- 1: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0 https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0 2: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Full_002dSource-Bootstrap.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Full_002dSour...

rramadass 3y ago
This is damn impressive! I am sure most of us have never even thought on these lines! Have to spend some time trying to "grasp" it. Thanks for posting this.
pxc 3y ago
I forgot the guy's name and fucked up by only looking at some of the most recent commits. Another hacker to highlight, and the one whose lectures taught me about these efforts when I found them on YouTube, is Jan Nieuwenhuizen, who goes by janneke online. He's the author of GNU MES (Maxwell's Equations of Software), the scheme interpreter used in this bootstrap effort, and IIRC he's worked on many parts of this whole thing. As a bit of an apology as well as a followup, here's some talks he gave a few of years ago about this whole bootstrap story! janneke's talk from FOSDEM 2017: https://youtu.be/mhopx8J2Z8s https://youtu.be/mhopx8J2Z8s janneke's talk from FOSDEM 2020: https://youtu.be/XvVW80dDF8I https://youtu.be/XvVW80dDF8I I'm a real fan but I'm only a spectator and my memory sucks. Sorry :(

by pxc 3y ago

rramadass 3y ago

This is damn impressive! I am sure most of us have never even thought on these lines! Have to spend some time trying to "grasp" it. Thanks for posting this.

pxc 3y ago

I forgot the guy's name and fucked up by only looking at some of the most recent commits. Another hacker to highlight, and the one whose lectures taught me about these efforts when I found them on YouTube, is Jan Nieuwenhuizen, who goes by janneke online. He's the author of GNU MES (Maxwell's Equations of Software), the scheme interpreter used in this bootstrap effort, and IIRC he's worked on many parts of this whole thing. As a bit of an apology as well as a followup, here's some talks he gave a few of years ago about this whole bootstrap story! janneke's talk from FOSDEM 2017: https://youtu.be/mhopx8J2Z8s https://youtu.be/mhopx8J2Z8s janneke's talk from FOSDEM 2020: https://youtu.be/XvVW80dDF8I https://youtu.be/XvVW80dDF8I I'm a real fan but I'm only a spectator and my memory sucks. Sorry :(