Re: Publishing an Official Statement on Self-Hosted Compilers

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Alex Griffin <address@hidden> skribis:

> One thing I think the Guix project should do is work with the
> reproducible builds folks to publish a document explaining the issues
> involved with self-hosted compilers. It should encourage language
> communities to continuously maintain some way to build their language
> starting from hand-written C source code (or another language which can
> itself be bootstrapped from C). It could also mention that some members
> of our community are exploring ways to bootstrap gcc.
>
> What do you think? It might be a total flop, but it looks like something
> we should try anyway! At the moment I do not see other communities
> talking about this. Guix is deeply concerned about these issues, but
> ultimately we cannot fix everything alone. If we can convince the
> Rust/OCaml/Haskell folks that this is important, we may be able to
> attract a much larger group of people to bear on the problem.

I think it’s a good idea!  A lot of the work to fix this issue will be
to raise awareness among compiler writers and invite them to have a
bootstrapping story like you describe.

Other people in the reproducible-builds community are interested in this
so yes, it sounds like the right place to discuss it.

Would you like to get it started?  :-)  We could discuss it on
address@hidden and here.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ http://lists.reproducible-builds.org/pipermail/rb-general/