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Adjacent (resilient, low-level, big-vision, auditable) projects include:
http://collapseos.org/ Forth OS, bootstrapable from paper, for z80
https://urbit.org/ standalone, distributed, auditable, provable, minimalist
https://justine.lol/ APE (actually portable executable); cosmopolitan libc
From the GitHub for on-ramp: it’s “self-bootstrapping and can compile itself from scratch”. What does that mean? How can it compile itself if it doesn’t exist?
Cool project, love the bit about aliens
From the GitHub for on-ramp: it’s “self-bootstrapping and can compile itself from scratch”. What does that mean? How can it compile itself if it doesn’t exist?
They do go into some detail of the steps involved. Basically, it seems as though the system unravels itself, going from simple things to more complex.
I wonder what's the author's view on Forth, seems like the role of the bytecode VM here might be interchangeable with a Forth implementation.
Author here. I think my opinion would be about the same as the authors of the stage0 project [1]. They invested quite a bit of time trying to get Forth to work but ultimately abandoned it. Forth has been suggested often for bootstrapping a C compiler, and I hope someone does it someday, but so far no one has succeeded. Programming for a stack machine is really hard, whereas programming for a register machine is compa…
https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do go into some detail of the steps involved. Basically, it seems as though the system unravels itself, going from simple things to more complex.
Thanks, but perhaps I should have been more clear in my question. How can something self-compile if it doesn't have a compiler to start with? Does the onramp source contain some machine code that is a compiler already?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. I think my opinion would be about the same as the authors of the stage0 project [1]. They invested quite a bit of time trying to get Forth to work but ultimately abandoned it. Forth has been suggested often for bootstrapping a C compiler, and I hope someone does it someday, but so far no one has succeeded. Programming for a stack machine is really hard, whereas programming for a register machine is compa…
You might get a kick out of DuskOS(baremetal forth system)'s C compiler. https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...
That being said, the goal of stage0 is to ultimately compile gcc and there's no way to do that with Dusk OS.
That being said (again), this README in stage0 could be updated because I indeed think that Dusk is a good counterpoint to this critique of Forth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do go into some detail of the steps involved. Basically, it seems as though the system unravels itself, going from simple things to more complex.
Thanks, but perhaps I should have been more clear in my question. How can something self-compile if it doesn't have a compiler to start with? Does the onramp source contain some machine code that is a compiler already?
After it incrementally builds on itself all the way up to a fully functional C compiler.
TL;DR: this is an exercise in implementing a C compiler from scratch. "From scratch" here means "without an existing gcc/clang," so consider civilization destruction scenarios, aliens reading our source code, EMP strike that takes out all smart silicon, corporate policy won't let you download development tools, you only have a javascript console and gumption, etc... To do this, you must: 1. Implement a small tool tha…