Re: rust work in progress conflicts

[Andy Wingo]

On Thu 05 May 2016 16:46, Alex Griffin <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, May 5, 2016, at 08:35 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> 
>> Yeah it’s OK to do it in the order: write the package bootstrapped from
>> the binary blob, and then work on bootstrapping it from OCaml.
>
> I do not think that bootstrapping Rust from OCaml is a practical goal.
> When you guys have talked about bootstrapping gcc from an older version,
> I don't think it has involved even a dozen gcc versions, let alone 319!
> It's a huge amount of work, to the point where it may even be easier to
> write a new Rust compiler from scratch. Even if it succeeded, it would
> take over a full week to build the current Rust release, meanwhile OCaml
> requires a blob anyway.
>
> I'd love to be proven wrong, but in any case I don't think it's
> reasonable to expect Jelle Licht to take on this project just because he
> assumed the mantle of rustc packager.

I agree with Alex FWIW.

Also FWIW, I think in the future a sane bootstrap is probably more
likely from a MIR interpreter (something like this but implemented from
another language: https://github.com/tsion/miri/tree/master/src).

But given that even OCaml includes a binary blob (!), I don't think that
we can practically require bootstrapped language implementations to
bootstrap all the way.

Andy