onramp VS sicp

It can be difficult to explain why bootstrapping is important. I put a "Why?" section in the README of my own bootstrapping compiler [0] for this reason.

Security is a big reason and it's one the bootstrappable team tend to focus on. In order to avoid the trusting trust problem and other attacks (like the recent xz backdoor), we need to be able to bootstrap everything from pure source code. They go as far as deleting all pre-generated files to ensure that they only rely on things that are hand-written and auditable. So bootstrapping Python for example is pretty complicated because the source contains code generated by Python scripts.

I'm much more interested in the cultural preservation aspect of it. We want to preserve contemporary media for future archaeologists, for example in the Arctic World Archive [1]. Unfortunately it's pointless if they have no way to decode it. So what do we do? We can preserve the specs, but we can't really expect them to implement x265 and everything else they would need from scratch. We can preserve binaries, but then they'd need to either get thousand-year-old hardware running or virtualize a thousand-year-old CPU. We can give them, say, a definition of a simple Lisp, and then give them code that runs on that, but then who's going to implement x265 in a basic Lisp? None of this is really practical.

That's why in my project I made a simple virtual machine, then bootstrapped C on top of it. It's trivially portable, not just to present-day architectures but to future and alien architectures as well. Any future archaeologist or alien civilization could implement the VM in a day, then run the C bootstrap on it, then compile ffmpeg or whatever and decode our media.

[0]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp?tab=readme-ov-file#why-bo...

The team at bootstrappable.org have been working very hard at creating compilers that can bootstrap from scratch to prevent this kind of attack (the "trusting trust" attack is another name for it.) They've gotten to the point where they can bootstrap in freestanding so they don't need to trust any OS binaries anymore (see builder-hex0.)

I've spent a lot of my spare time the past year or so working on my own attempt at a portable bootstrappable compiler. It's partly to prevent this attack, and also partly so that future archaeologists can easily bootstrap C even if their computer architectures can't run any binaries from the present day.

https://github.com/ludocode/onramp

It's nowhere near done but I'm starting a new job soon so I felt like I needed to publish what I have. It does at least bootstrap from handwritten x86_64 machine code up to a compiler for most of C89, and I'm working on the final stage that will hopefully be able to compile TinyCC and other similar C compilers soon.

The texinfo version was I believe the source for the really nice HTML version if you want to read it in a browser, but with nice formatting that the MIT original version: https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/

hey guys, I'm reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I'm reading this epub version: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman

I recommend reading the SICP (fore example here) to get your mind blown and start with lisp syntax. The book uses Scheme which is a Lisp dialect but not Common Lisp. I found the concepts mind-blowing.

This is a good site for reading it: https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/

HTML5 version that is designed to look like pdf version

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/