IRC channel logs

<eyalroz>Here to check whether the GCC bootstrapping chain described here:

<eyalroz> https://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html

<eyalroz>is still relevant today, or whether there have been further improvements/simpilifcations since.

<ekaitz>eyalroz: we made some things on top of that

<ekaitz>and we are still improving

<ekaitz>currently, we skipped over gcc 2.95

<eyalroz>ekaitz: Oh, I think the chain I saw doesn't have gcc 2.94...

<eyalroz>See this StackOverflow post from 2021: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9429491/how-are-gcc-and-g-bootstrapped/65708958#65708958

<eyalroz>and my more recent question about improvements: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79806503/is-the-gcc-bootstrapping-chain-improved-simplified-relative-to-2021?noredirect=1&lq=1

<ekaitz>eyalroz: we build 4.6.4 with tcc directly

<ekaitz>in fact, i forked gcc and maintain a copy of 4.6.4 with riscv support

<eyalroz>Do you suppose you (personally or bootstrappable.org) could perhaps post something more up-to-date about the bootstrap chain? It is both educational and of practical importance for some people.

<ekaitz>eyalroz: https://codeberg.org/guix/bootstrappable/pulls/2

<ekaitz>not that i'm not trying :)

<eyalroz>ekaitz: I gave you a rocket emoji... :-)

<ekaitz>:)

<eyalroz>I wonder - if there are known bugs in GCC, and some of them I suppose apply to GCC 4.6 or 4.7 and have only been fixed in later versions - does that not mean there is some chance of something being wrong with a newer GCC version compiled with one of them?

<eyalroz>Also, if newer-GCC gradually starts using constructs from newer versions of the relevant language standards (C, C++) - doesn't it become unbuildable with GCC 4.6/4.7 ? Or is the idea to build a sequence of progressively-increasing-versions of GCC?

<ekaitz>we can build 9.5 with 4.6.4

<ekaitz>more modern ones need this intermediate step

<ekaitz>about bugs, yes, they can happen, but life is hard

<ekaitz>also, I made the port to riscv

<ekaitz>ACTION is not a compiler engineer

<stikonas>even GCC 10 can be built with some light patching

<stikonas>but not anything newer

<stikonas>anyway, most bugs don't propagate

<stikonas>but we have ocasionally seen bugs that do propagate

<stikonas>when ekaitz and I initially bootstrapped tcc on riscv

<stikonas>it was buggy and no amount of recompiling would fix it

<stikonas>that buggy version could build a lot of stuff

<ekaitz>what a time! we enjoyed a lot didn't we?

<stikonas>lots of utilities such as gzip, tar, make etc...

<stikonas>yeah!

<stikonas>but then we saw some crashes

<stikonas>that were not present if you build the same tcc source with gcc

<ekaitz>yeah, we had some funny ones

<ekaitz>some of them were triggered by the second compilation

<ekaitz>first compiler is wrong -> next compiler produces weird code -> next program fails

IRC channel logs

2025-11-01.log