alt Hacker NewsThanks, that actually look like a very solid baseline to start things with. Are you aware of onramp[1]? They use a custom VM to base compiler and shell on, it's extra steps, but could be more flexible long term.
Thanks, that actually look like a very solid baseline to start things with. Are you aware of onramp[1]? They use a custom VM to base compiler and shell on, it's extra steps, but could be more flexible long term.
I'm the author of Onramp. Thanks for linking it!
One of the VMs I wrote for Onramp is in POSIX shell [1]. This was intended to make C bootstrappable on any POSIX system of any architecture with nothing besides the shell. Unfortunately it's about 100,000x too slow to be useful. It's also at least as complicated as a machine code VM. I've since mostly abandoned the POSIX shell idea.
Onramp does have a very simple C89 VM though, and its purpose is for bootstrapping modern C on systems that have only a basic C compiler [2]. So this c89cc.sh could in theory work. I tried it and unfortunately it doesn't quite compile yet (and doesn't give a comprehensible error message either.) Even if it worked, c89cc.sh only compiles to x86_64 ELF, and it's way more complicated than the x86_64 ELF machine code Onramp VM [3].
This has been a bit of a recurring theme with Onramp: anything I've tried to get away from the initial machine code stages ends up being more complicated than handwritten machine code. Still, it's nice to have a lot of different ways to bootstrap. I love seeing projects like this and I'm glad to see more people taking bootstrapping seriously.
[1]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/...
[2]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/...
[3]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/platform/vm/...