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<matrix_bridge><emilytrau> got to gcc 13 in the nix bootstrap woooo :DD

<janneke>emilytrau: that's amazing!

<[exa]>whew cool! just curious-- how long is the bootstrap chain?

<h01ger>4km, or 327681337 stacked 3.5" floppy disks ;)

<h01ger>i ment: in time, or in sw projects build steps? :)

<janneke>[exa]: the bootstrap chain will only shorter when upstream projects hear about supply chain security and start taking their responsibility wrt being bootstrappable

<[exa]>:D true

<lilyp>*looks at Java*

<[exa]>I meant-- iirc the latest gcc buildable with mes&pals was like 3.x, so I wondered how many gcc's are in the middle

<janneke>in all honesty, you can *look* at most every compiler builder out there, including gcc and tcc

<lilyp>Guix counts from boot0 to boot6

<janneke>also, if either gcc or tcc had taken their responsibility, this irc channel would most probably not have existed

<lilyp>fair enough, but IIUC, both are at least reasonable enough to build using *a* C compiler

<matrix_bridge><emilytrau> [exa]: the number differs depending on how you count it but i have about 30 packages in the chain between stage0 and gcc 13

<matrix_bridge><emilytrau> in terms of compilers my chain is: mes -> bootstrappable tcc -> tcc+mes -> tcc+musl -> gcc 4.6 no c++ -> gcc 4.6 -> gcc 7 -> gcc13

<matrix_bridge><emilytrau> i've seen other chains use versions like 2.95, 4.0, 4.7, 4.9, etc. i'm really excited that theoretically risc-v should be supported without needing to port the 4.6 patches to any other intermediary versions

<janneke>lilyp: no, anything later than gcc-4.7 cannot be built with a C compiler; also there are many C compilers that cannot build gcc-4.7

<janneke>emilytrau: oooh, you beat us to it to remove gcc-2.95, well done!!!

<janneke>ACTION has been working to do tcc+extended mes libc->gcc 4.6...but i guess that taking the musl route is a smart(er) hack

<janneke>i agree that tcc + some-libc -> gcc-4.6 (with riscv, powerpc and whatnot backported) is the way to go

<lilyp>should have been a C++ compiler :(

<janneke>yeah, and we don't know of any decent "a C++ compiler"s other than gcc-4.6 that are bootstrappable

<matrix_bridge><emilytrau> janneke: credit to t184256 for showing tcc+musl can bootstrap gcc 4.7 first ^_^

<janneke>+1, also for everyone helping eachother

<janneke>emilytrau: chances are, that your bootstrap "just works" for arm too, we were having so many unexpected troubles (oabi/eabi) with gcc-2.95 and glibc-2.2.5 that making the jump from tcc to gcc-4.6 already seemed the smartest route

<matrix_bridge><Andrius Štikonas> Yeah, musl helps a lot

<matrix_bridge><Andrius Štikonas> When working on live-bootstrap, I investigated various libc's

<matrix_bridge><Andrius Štikonas> And musl is far easier to build than anything else

<muurkha>thanks, that's really useful to know

<muurkha>do you mean in terms of what it demands from the C compiler, or just its build system?

<muurkha>(musl)

<stikonas>muurkha: both

<stikonas>build system is a fairly simple handwritten shell script + makefiles

<stikonas>and needs a few coreutils

<muurkha>awesome

<muurkha>I suppose you don't have any idea how much RAM it needs, do you?

<stikonas>no, I dont know...

<stikonas>but most likely far less than what mes uses

<muurkha>I'm wondering if I can compile it with pcc on a microcontroller

<muurkha>not with mes

<muurkha>(the other, opposite meaning of bootstrapping: your computer can recompile its own systems software from source code, using a pre-existing compiled version of that software)

<stikonas>well, musl wouldn't run on microcontroller

<stikonas>it needs a fairly featurful kernel

<stikonas>rickmasters even had to patch it a bit to run on Fiwix

<muurkha>what do you mean?

IRC channel logs

2023-10-07.log