Intro to GCC bootstrap in RISC-V | Hacker News Reader

Intro to GCC bootstrap in RISC-V

ekaitz.elenq.tech

58 pointspabs311 comments

The only c++98 compiler able to compile a recent gcc is gcc 4.7.4, that being written in simple and plain C.

The bootstrapping project which gnu mes and co are part of, does plan to take over gcc 4.7.4 maintenance (a lot will have to be done, but a lot can be removed).

Yep, moving gcc from simple and plain Cto c++98 was one of the biggest mistake in open source software, ever.

From a maintainability perspective you're right, switching GCC from C to C++ was unfortunate, but it was done to improve type safety, which is tricky to get right in older C versions which don't have _Generic.

Why not cross compile gcc with the gcc on your laptop?

It looks like the intention is to bootstrap from source using an absolute minimum of precompiled binaries.

For an average user I'd imagine this is mostly just intellectually interesting but it's potentially useful for distros to aggressively minimise the amount of unauditable code involved in their builds.

The GNU Mes project (mentioned in the article) seems to be part of general work in this direction: https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

Which seems to be GUIX-driven: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-boots...

And some funding has been provided to the author to help with this: https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-RISCV/

People working on Mes and Guix are of course involved with the Bootstrappable builds, of which the site (https://bootstrappable.org/) has more information.

Interesting project - I hadn't realised we'd sleepwalked into a reality where this would be quite so difficult.

What a non-article!

What a non-comment.

Care to explain why you think so?

They’re not wrong.

Take all the info in it. And you'd struggle to hit the twitter char cap.

Not even a thread. A single tweet.

The later parts are more interesting.

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