stage0
pottery
stage0 | pottery | |
---|---|---|
22 | 14 | |
888 | 119 | |
- | - | |
3.9 | 1.8 | |
3 months ago | about 2 years ago | |
Assembly | C | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | MIT License |
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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
pottery
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Popular Data Structure Libraries in C ?
Pottery - The page for open hash map reads "Documentation still needs to be written. In the meantime check out the examples."
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So what's the best data structures and algorithms library for C?
"Using macros" is a broad description that covers multiple paradigms. There are libraries that use macros in combination with typed pointers and functions that take void* parameters to provide some degree of API genericity and type safety at the same time (e.g. stb_ds and, as you mentioned, my own CC). There are libraries that use macros (or #include directives) to manually instantiate templates (e.g. STC, M*LIB, and Pottery). And then there are libraries that are implemented entirely or almost entirely as macros (e.g. uthash).
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Better C Generics: The Extendible _Generic
The prototype of CC used this mechanism to provide a generic API for types instantiated via templates (so basically like other container libraries, but with an extendible-_Generic-based API laid over the top of the generated types). This approach has some significant advantages over the approach CC now uses, but I got a bit obsessed with eliminating the need to manually instantiate templates.
- C_dictionary: A simple dynamically typed and sized hashmap in C - feedback welcome
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Common libraries and data structures for C
I think it's common for C programmers to roll their own. I did the same [0].
I went pretty deep into composable C templates to build mine so it's more powerful than most. The containers can handle non-bitwise-movable types with full C++-style lifecycle functions and such, and the sort algorithms can handle dynamic and non-contiguous arrays (they are powerful enough to implement qsort() [1], which is more than I can say for any other C sort templates I've seen.) My reasoning for the complexity at the time was that any powerful container library is going to be reasonably complex in implementation (as anyone who's looked at STL source code knows), so it just needs to be encapsulated behind a good interface.
I'm not so sure that's true anymore. These sorts of simpler libraries like the one linked here definitely seem to be more popular among C programmers. I think if people are using C, it's not just the C++ language complexity they want to get away from, but also the implementation complexity of libraries and such. There's a balance to be had for sure, and I think the balance varies from person to person, which is why no library has emerged as the de facto standard for containers in C.
[0]: https://github.com/ludocode/pottery
- C++ containers but in C
- Pottery – A pure C, include-only, type-safe, algorithm template library
- Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
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Type-safe generic data structures in C
Yes! The include style of templates in C is way better than the old way of huge macros to instantiate code. The template code can look mostly like idiomatic C, it interacts way better with a debugger, it gives better compiler errors... everything about it is better and it's finally starting to become more popular.
I've open sourced my own C template library here:
https://github.com/ludocode/pottery
Not only does it use the #include style of templates, but it actually makes the templates composable. It takes this idea pretty far, for example having a lifecycle template that lets you define operations on your type like move, copy, destroy, etc. This way the containers can fully manage the lifecycles of your types even if they're not bitwise movable.
There's also this other more popular C template library, one that tries to more directly port C++ templates to C but with a lot less features:
https://github.com/glouw/ctl/
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Beating Up on Qsort (2019)
This article doesn't really make it clear but the merge sort discussion is specifically about glibc's implementation of qsort(). glibc's qsort() and Wine's qsort() are the only ones I know of that use merge sort to implement qsort(). Most implementations use quick sort.
I recently did my own benchmarking on various qsort()s since I was trying to implement a faster one. The various BSDs and macOS qsort() are all faster than glibc at sorting integers and they don't allocate memory:
https://github.com/ludocode/pottery/tree/master/examples/pot...
Of course sorting is much faster if you can inline the comparator so a templated sort algorithm is always going to be faster than a function that takes a function pointer. But this does not require C++; it can be done in plain C. The templated intro_sort from Pottery (linked above) is competitive with std::sort, as are the excellent swensort/sort templates:
https://github.com/swenson/sort
What are some alternatives?
rizin - UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset.
mpack - MPack - A C encoder/decoder for the MessagePack serialization format / msgpack.org[C]
arocc - A C compiler written in Zig.
pdqsort - Pattern-defeating quicksort.
chibicc - A small C compiler
mavis - opinionated typing library for elixir
libcperciva - BSD-licensed C99/POSIX library code shared between tarsnap, scrypt, kivaloo, spiped, and bsdiff.
sc - Common libraries and data structures for C.
bug - Scala 2 bug reports only. Please, no questions — proper bug reports only.
Klib - A standalone and lightweight C library
c4 - C in four functions
ctl - My variant of the C Template Library