bootstrap-seeds
mrustc
bootstrap-seeds | mrustc | |
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6 | 75 | |
73 | 2,095 | |
- | - | |
5.2 | 8.8 | |
5 months ago | 1 day ago | |
Assembly | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | MIT License |
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bootstrap-seeds
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NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
This[0] is basically the hand-documentation of those bytes then. Handwritten ELF header and assembly code.
[0] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...
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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes
The bootstrap seed, https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX..., is a tiny interpreter that takes a much larger program written in a special-purpose, bytecode-based language. This proceeds in turn once or twice more--special purpose program generating another interpreter for another special-purpose language--until you end up with a minimal Scheme interpreter, which then can be used to execute a C compiler program.
All of this is incredible work, but a minimal C-subset compiler in under 512 bytes seems like a unique achievement.
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Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust (Turing Award Lecture)
There is also live-bootstrap which uses a similar bootstrap chain to Guix (stage0 -> Mes -> tcc -> gcc), but without needing Guile/guix-daemon binaries etc. The whole thing starts with just a 357-byte binary seed (source)!
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Zig is now self–hosted by default
Yeah, it's a binary blob, but it's small enough to be easily auditable. Anyone with some knowledge of x86 assembly can read the annotated version [1] and verify that it does what it claims (which is to convert ASCII hex with comments into binary).
You're right, it also requires a Linux kernel, and of course, you also have to trust the hardware you're running it on. Still, it reduces the amount of stuff we have to take for granted as trusted, which I think is a good thing. (I'm not involved in the project, just an admirer).
[1]: https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/b09a8b8cbcb6...
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stage0-posix was ported to RISC-V
stage0-posix just gained initial support for RISC-V (64-bit). It starts with 392 byte hex assembler, 361 byte "shell" and bootstraps simple linker (hex2), macro assembler (M0). Then it builds cc_riscv64 RISC-V compiler written in RISC-V assembly and uses it to build simple C compiler written in C (M2-Planet). Then it builds a few extra utilities (cp, mkdir, untar, ungz, sha256sum, chmod)
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Reproducibility
From a security point of view the only thing that gentoo users need to achieve similar levels of security is a bootstrapped compiler from a known good seed. The source code is already deterministic by definition. After that all you need is a compiler bootstrapped via something like https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds which can be independently verified. It would probably be useful to be able to have independent bootstraps arrive at the same binary output for a compiler, but probably only as an option. Ultimately way less work for the same level of security.
mrustc
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Why do lifetimes need to be leaky?
No, you don't. Existential proof: mrustc ignores lifetimes. Just flat out simply ignores. It changes some corner-cases related to HRBT, yet rustc compiled by mrustc works (that's BTW mrustc exist: to bootsrap the rustc compiler).
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I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust
Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.
https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
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Rust – Faster compilation with the parallel front-end in nightly
Well, there is mrustc[0], a Rust compiler that doesn't include a borrow-checker, so it's possible to compile (at least some versions of) Rust without a borrow checker, though it might not result in the most optimized code.
AFAIK there are some optimization like the infamous `noalias` optimization (which took several tries to get turned on[1]) that uses information established during borrow checking.
I'm also not sure what the relation with NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) is, where I would assume you would need at least a primitive borrow-checker to establish some information that the backend might be interested in. Then again, mrustc compiles Rust versions that have NLL features without a borrow-checker, so it's again probably more on the optimization side than being essential.
[0]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57259339
- Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
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Forty years of GNU and the free software movement
> Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.
It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.
You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)
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Building rustc on sparcv9 Solaris
Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?
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GCC 13 and the state of gccrs
Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today
- Any alternate Rust compilers?
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Stop Comparing Rust to Old C++
There are three. The official one, mrustc (no borrow checker, but can essentially compile the official rustc) and GCC (can't really compile anything substantial yet). Only rustc is production-ready though.
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Can I make it so that only the newest version of Rust gets installed?
That probably depends on what you mean by problematic. Having an ever increasing chain of dependencies isn’t the most desirable situation so there has been some work to trim the bootstrap chain. In 2018, when the blogpost I linked above was written, mrustc was used to bootstrap rust 1.19.0; now mrustc can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 so the chain to recent versions is much shorter than if all those intervening versions back through 1.19.0 needed to be built. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
What are some alternatives?
live-bootstrap - Use of a Linux initramfs to fully automate the bootstrapping process
gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust
zig-bootstrap - take off every zig
gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust
bcc - bcc is a b compiler
llvm-cbe - resurrected LLVM "C Backend", with improvements
stage0-posix-x86
rust-ttapi
turning-polyglot-solutions-into-t
miri - An interpreter for Rust's mid-level intermediate representation
mescc-tools-seed - A place for public review of the posix port of stage0
gcc-rust - a (WIP) Rust frontend for gcc / a gcc backend for rustc