Stage0 Alternatives

stage0 reviews and mentions

• Bootstrappable Builds
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Aug 2024

  This[0] repo which has the stage0 code used by GPs linked repo includes some explanation in the README about why not Forth or Lisp - in summary it turned out to be harder than that, at least for the authors of that project.

  0. https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

• Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2023
• Stage0: A minimal bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2023
• Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2022
• Stage0 – A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2022
• Nixpacks takes a source directory and produces an OCI compliant image
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2022

  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...?"
  1 project | /r/linux | 12 Jun 2022

  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
  1 project | /r/github_trends | 23 May 2022
• Common libraries and data structures for C
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 May 2022

  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
  1 project | /r/coding | 10 May 2022

  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.

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