Re: Removing compilers that cannot be bootstrapped

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> It is probably easier for us to try to write primitive compilers in
>> Guile than to start from scratch each time.  Then the only blob we need
>> to figure out how to bootstrap would be Guile itself.
>
> +1
>
> Though of course, writing a faithful C or Haskell or OCaml compiler is
> huge task, and chances are we’ll always miss compilers for some
> languages.
>
> So I think we should take both routes: on one hand try to come up with
> minimalist Guile implementations of languages (your work with Yale
> Haskell, or the project on Bournish), and on the other, with help from
> the reproducible-builds.org group, raise awareness about the issue among
> compiler writers and users so that the ability to bootstrap from
> another, common programming language becomes a requirement.
>
> Of course Guile itself is pretty big, so we may eventually have to think
> about a “PreScheme” language, as is used to bootstrap Scheme48¹.
> Epsilon²³ contains interesting ideas as well.
>
>
> Ludo’.
>
> ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme
> ² https://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon/
> ³ http://ageinghacker.net/publications/#phd-thesis

It's a pretty thrilling and enticing idea.  It would be a ton of work.
I think we'd need to get more people excited about and successfully
contributing to Guile for it to happen.  Thus I think we'd really need
to advertise more just how cool Guile's compiler tower is and get people
jazzed up about it.  But bumping into Guile's compiler tower
documentation is one of the reasons I started paying attention to Guile
about a year and a half ago:

  http://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-beyond-javascript/

I'm sure others would find that narrative compelling.

It would be interesting to see the motivations of multi-language-Guile
from its earliest days come back to the forefront with style and
compelling motivation.

 - Chris