To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
  • solrize@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    This project sounds kind of masochistic but the idea is to bootstrap Rust from tinycc, and have traceability down to the lowest level assembly code. There is a step missing though? Tinycc is written in C after all.

    I think it would make more sense to bootstrap from a small Lisp written in assembly language, if the traceability goal is worthwhile at all. There is nothing special about C.

    • underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      2 months ago

      The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

      Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

      So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.