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Comment by squibbles | Hacker News Reader

I still cringe when I think back to some C projects from long ago, where the dependency chains of headers and libraries where unfathomably byzantine.

On a related note, lately I have been looking into some biochemistry topics and their relation to computer science. It seems that cyclic dependencies are possibly a requirement for life, which makes faithful simulations of biochemical processes an interesting challenge.

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I’m a compiler nerd at the moment. I have an inherent trust of things that bootstrap themselves, as if it means they are conceptually more pure. I’m not sure whether that is 100% well founded, but it sounds similar to some of these observations. :)

I think self-hosting is just a little over-rated for languages. It's good that Rust and C++ are self-hosting, you'd expect those to be languages you can write a compiler in.

But Lua and JavaScript satisfy their own niche just fine without having popular runtimes written in themselves.

There are a few JS interpreters written in JS, don't know about Lua.

Most languages don't aspire to be so conceptually-complete that they insist on being bootstrapped. Which is fine, I make my living with them.

Those that do, however, are immensely beautiful and there is more to be learned from them.

The C language and gcc are a cyclic dependency too.

Only if you don't consider time, or optional dependencies. GCC 10 _can_ be built with GCC 10, but it was probably built with GCC 9 the first time around.

If you can bootstrap it, and you can, then it's not really a hard, unbreakable cycle, right? It's just an option that's quicker than starting from tcc or whatever every time.

But how would you build the first GCC in that chain?

Using another C compiler, if none exists, create one in Assembly or other programming language in the target platform and go from there.

TCC 0.9.27 can build GCC 2.95.3. You can build TCC using GNU Mes, which itself can be built using M2-Planet, which is written in a subset of C.

https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

Furthermore, M2-Planet can be built by another C compiler written in assembly, all the way down to hex instructions.

https://github.com/oriansj/mescc-tools-seed/

These projects are from the Bootstrappable Builds folks:

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/

That is an interesting observation. I wonder whether the cycling in chemistry is more about information flow then like (negative?) feedback, it helps in making a stable system.

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