neat
stage0
neat | stage0 | |
---|---|---|
3 | 22 | |
110 | 888 | |
0.9% | - | |
9.4 | 3.9 | |
12 days ago | 3 months ago | |
D | Assembly | |
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
neat
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The Neat Programming Language
It runs on plain C ABI, so you can just define C functions as `extern(C)`, just as you would in D. But you can also use `std.macro.cimport` to import C headers directly. Check out the Dragon demo, https://github.com/Neat-Lang/neat/blob/master/demos/dragon.n... :
macro import std.macro.cimport;
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Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
Funny sidestory: The way my compiler ( https://github.com/neat-lang/neat ) used to build is, two years ago there was an initial compiler that was written in D. And every time you checked it out on a new system, there was a file with a list of breaking commits, and it would:
- git clone itself in a subfolder
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Show HN: C3 – a C alternative that looks like C
Sure, but keep in mind it's pre-pre-alpha and the current released version is kind of outdated (ping me if you actually want to try it):
https://github.com/neat-lang/neat
This is more a D-like than a C-like, but it only breaks C syntax in areas where IMO C straight up made the wrong call, like the inside-out type syntax.
The thing I'm most proud of is the full-powered macro system, which is really more of a compile-time compiler plugin system.
A good example of a macro would be listcomprehensions: https://github.com/Neat-Lang/neat/blob/master/src/neat/macro...
You can tell it's just compiler code that happens to be loaded at project compiletime.
`compiler.$expr xxx` is itself a macro, that parses an expression `xxx` and returns an expression that creates a syntax tree that, when compiled, is equivalent to having written `xxx`. It's effectively the opposite of `eval`. In that expression, `$identifier` is expanded to a variable reference to "identifier".
So `ASTSymbol test = compiler.$expr $where && $test;` is equivalent to `ASTSymbol test = new ASTBinary("&&", where, test)`. (This shows its worth as expressions become more expansive.)
All in all, this lets you write `bool b = [all a == 5 for a in array]`, and it's exactly equivalent to a plain for loop. You can see the exact for loop at line 103 in that file. `({ })` is stolen from gcc; google "statement expression".
stage0
- Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
- Stage0: A minimal bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC
- Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig
- Stage0 – A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries
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Nixpacks takes a source directory and produces an OCI compliant image
Somewhat tangential, but I'm curious how big the bootstrap seed for Nix is. That is, if you wanted to build the entire world, what's a minimum set of binaries you'd need?
Guix has put quite a bit of work into this, AFAIU, and it's getting close to being bootstrappable all the way from stage0 [0]. Curious if some group is also working on similar things for Nix.
[0]:https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
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"Do you believe that every upstream project... is examined by an expert who can accurately identify whether said project contains malware...?"
https://www.bootstrappable.org/ has some good info. Reading the source of https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 is also very enlightening. It's set its goal to be understandable by 70% of programmers.
- Stage0 - A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries
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Common libraries and data structures for C
Even if they aren't, people absolutely should be able to bootstrap new platforms from scratch. It's important to have confidence in our tools, in our ability to rebuild from scratch, and to be safe against the "trusting trust" attack among other things.
Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:
https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.
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How To Build an Evil Compiler
One countermeasure not mentioned here is bootstrapping a compiler with a program small enough to be manually verified. The stage0 project is under 1KB (small enough that the binary can be, and has been, manually checked against the hand written assembly), and GNU Guix (a system for reproducible, isolated builds) is currently working on moving it's bootstrap speed to stage0. That means that, fairly soon, there will be a large set of software that doesn't have a connection to an original C compiler.
- A minimal C compiler in x86 assembly