path: root/notes.org

#+TITLE: Bootstrapping, reproducibility, etc.
#+AUTHOR: Vincent Ambo
#+DATE: <2018-03-10 Sat>

* Compiler bootstrapping

  This section contains notes about compiler bootstrapping, the
  history thereof, which compilers need it - and so on:

** C

** Haskell
   - self-hosted compiler (GHC)

** Common Lisp
   CL is fairly interesting in this space because it is a language
   that is defined via an ANSI standard that compiler implementations
   normally actually follow!

** Python

* A note on runtimes
  Sometimes the compiler just isn't enough ...

** LLVM
** JVM

* Resources:

  http://bootstrappable.org/


* Slide thoughts:
  1. Hardware trust has been discussed here a bunch, most recently
     during the puri.sm talk. Hardware trust is important, as we see
     with IME, but it's striking that people often take a leap to "I'm
     now on my trusted Debian with free software".

     Unless you built it yourself from scratch (Spoiler: you haven't)
     you're placing trust in what is basically foreign binary blobs.

     Agenda: Implications/attack vectors of this, state of the chicken
     & egg, the topic of reproducibility, what can you do? (Nix!)

  2. Chicken-and-egg issue

     It's an important milestone for a language to become self-hosted:
     You begin doing a kind of dogfeeding, you begin to enforce
     reliability & consistency guarantees to avoid having to redo your
     own codebase constantly and so on.

     However, the implication is now that you need your own compiler
     to compile itself.

     Common examples:
     - gcc builds with gcc