stage0
arocc
stage0 | arocc | |
---|---|---|
22 | 10 | |
888 | 765 | |
- | - | |
3.9 | 9.7 | |
3 months ago | 3 days ago | |
Assembly | Zig | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | MIT License |
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.
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
-
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
-
"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
-
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.
-
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
arocc
-
no more bit fiddling (and introducing bilge)
Possible reference as it requires to use the compiler as part of language abi: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc/issues/178 Not sure, where a better thread with explanations of the flaws is.
-
Zig Build System
Zig calls clang to compile C code. This doesn't add a new dependency since Zig already depends on LLVM. In the future when Zig doesn't depend as much on LLVM, there might be a reason to use a C compiler written in Zig (e.g. https://github.com/Vexu/arocc)
-
Embedded C Coding Standard
Bit field rules are underspecified or plain wrongly implemented, because in their edge cases clang and GCC differ in semantics. See https://github.com/Vexu/arocc/issues/178 This should be further restricted with static asserts as compiler semantics even changed with versions and doing this manually/doing code review is error prone.
-
How much better is Zig's "no-FFI" C interop compared to FFIs in other languages?
You might want to contribute or look into https://github.com/Vexu/arocc, which is planned to be eventually an alternative frontend. Is arocc able to handle your use cases?
- Aro: A C compiler written in Zig
-
Zig 0.9.0
> Does this mean that y'all are open to the self-hosted compiler supporting CPU architectures unlikely to ever have LLVM support?
Yes! We won't block 1.0 on the quality of the less mainstream targets, but that's what the tier system is for - to ship a compiler that has varying levels of quality for various targets, while communicating clearly to users what kind of experience they can expect for each one.
SuperH patches are absolutely welcome.
> how is zig cc anticipated to work with a self-hosted Zig? Will there be a dependency on clang [...]?
The main distribution of Zig will be LLVM/Clang-enabled. However it is already possible to build a version of Zig that does not have these features enabled. In such case, compiling C, C++, and Objective-C code will result in an error.
However, the arocc project[1] is emerging, which, depending on a combination of how much funding ZSF gets and how much enthusiasm the unpaid contributors working in their spare time have, is looking like a promising C frontend that would be available even without LLVM/Clang. It is C only, however, with no intention of compiling C++ or Objective-C.
> would zig cc support the planned C backend?
As it is currently implemented: no. Zig invokes clang to turn C source code into object files.
However, with the arocc frontend above, this would be converting the C source code into ZIR (or perhaps AIR), which could then be lowered with any of the backends, including the (partially complete) C backend. In such case, the C output would look drastically different than the input. It would look more like an IR than natural C code that a human would write.
[1]: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc
-
[Rust advocates] demean software that's not memory safe the way that politicians use their words to sow anger. C has won, and Rust blew it's shot aiming at C++ instead.
Implementing only the language part takes like 10k LOC.
- Maintain It with Zig
-
Adding ANSI C11 C compiler to D so it can import and compile C files directly
> 9. Without a C compiler, we're stuck with, wedded to, and beholden to libclang.
> I wouldn't be surprised that the eventual cost of adapting ourselves to
> libclang will exceed the cost of doing our own C compiler.
This is a really insightful point. I had to learn this the hard way :)
We might follow your lead on this, as we have done with so many other great ideas implemented in D.
Ironically, Vexu started from the other side as you, with the preprocessor mostly done, but the backend left to-do: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc
One thing that might make libclang worth the cost, however, is its ability to compile C++ code as well. On Zig's end of things, all we have to do is provide libcxx, libcxxabi, libunwind, compiler-rt, and linking, and then libclang is really pulling a lot of weight by compiling C++ code into object files. Sadly this ability is just too useful in practice to ignore. For example, LLVM itself is C++ so if Zig wants to be able to bootstrap itself, it needs this capability.
Still, I think your maneuver here is the best long-term approach to tackle this problem, and I imagine as time goes on we'll start to migrate towards D's solution here. Maybe someday the Zig distribution that does not have LLVM extensions enabled will be the more popular one!
I'll be watching the evolution of this new feature in D with great interest!
What are some alternatives?
rizin - UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset.
mach - zig game engine & graphics toolkit
chibicc - A small C compiler
zig-riscv-embedded - Experimental Zig-based CoAP node for the HiFive1 RISC-V board
libcperciva - BSD-licensed C99/POSIX library code shared between tarsnap, scrypt, kivaloo, spiped, and bsdiff.
bzflag - 3D multi-player tank battle game
bug - Scala 2 bug reports only. Please, no questions — proper bug reports only.
dstep - A tool for converting C and Objective-C headers to D modules
c4 - C in four functions
zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
pkgconf - package compiler and linker metadata toolkit
gforth - Gforth mirror on GitHub (original is on Savannah)