[M3devel] using interpreter as a bootstrap

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:44:55PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:50:44PM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> > 
> > Is C-- adequately maintained? I don't think so.
> 
> Bugs get fixed.  And there's very few of them reported.  But it's not 
> clear to me whether that's because it's so well-written, or because 
> almost no one uses it.
> 
> Active development seems to be at a stendstill.
> 
> > I'm also not super keen on depending on other projects.
> > We'll see..
> 
> I mentioned C-- because its implementation exists in both interpreted 
> and compiled versions.  That seems to be a way to bootstrap the whole 
> thing.  We could interpret the compiler using some portable 
> intermediate code -- we could even restrict the interpreter to provide 
> only a 32-bit machine, and then cross-compile from the interpreted 
> compiler to whatever machine we're installing on.  Since every Modula 
> 3 compiler seems to be able to generate code for every platform, 
> this is a way to avoid having a separate binary bootstrap for every 
> platform.

Of all the machies we already generatte code for, which has the easiest 
machine code to interpret?  We don't really have to invent a new 
interpretable object code -- we already have one.  Remember, the 
bootstrap only has to implement enough system resources to compile the 
core system.

-- hendrik


> 
> And a distro, like Debian, could have a source package that doesn't 
> need to have itself installed before it it can be installed.
> 
> -- hendrik
>