onramp VS component

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.

* Lifecycle management: Mount, Integrant or Component (https://github.com/tolitius/mount https://github.com/weavejester/integrant and https://github.com/stuartsierra/component)

When you start to have multiple stateful components (the database, the HTTP server, your Redis connection, a page cache, etc.), then you'll want to use a library like component that manages their (inter-)dependencies and provides a consistent notion of lifecycle.

Today I released a new version of Reveal Pro — dev.vlaaad/reveal-pro {:mvn/version "1.3.308"} — that adds sticker integration for system libraries such as mount, component and integrant!

I agree with the main sentiment from the article. Although I do think they are discussing Inversion of control more-so than dependency injection.

One of my first languages was .net and I was never able to really understand DI in that context that well.

Actually using javascript and ducktyping made me understand what it actually was.

I remember a .net job interview where I had to write a micro-service and opted to construct the dependency graph in the main function initialising "all" the classes there. Instead of discussing the pro's and con's of that approach they berated me for not using a DI framework (No I did not land that job, but in hindsight it was the most expensive job interview I've ever had. The room was filled with 8 developers going over my code).

The main thing the article glosses over is state. something people with a functional background hide from. But if you look at something like the httpclient in .net. I think it took the .net world like 10 years to start using the httpclient properly. Scope and lifetime of those kind of objects are important. managing connection pools, retry state, throttling or the incoming http request. DI does make that kind of thing easieR (I'm not saying it makes it better)

Look at clojure's component(https://github.com/stuartsierra/component), I'm not a clojure expert by far. But it is kinda DI/IOC in a functional language.

In closing we can agree that it is underused in the right places and overused in the wrong ones.

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component#no-function-should-take-the-entire-system-as-an-argument

Yeah like I mentioned I'm not like super sold on the everything-should-be-an-actor paradigm, but I find value in DDD + a light implementation of Components (similar to stuartsierra/component).

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component for managing components lifecycles in projects