Bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothing (2002)
Published in 2024, this chronicle by @sph details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
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Community Debate Themes:
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CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 83 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 16 comments
I like to imagine the following nightmare scenario: we write a compiler from scratch that it can bootstrap itself (like this one, or Stage0), then we do the same bootstrapping process for hardware - eg. write a FPGA that for a simple CPU that can run the compiler and build other stuff, we do all of this and then start building reproducible builds of everything we use today - gcc, clang, Linux, etc. Eventually we build an 100% open source machine where to run everything. After this step is done, we start running in parallel all the tools and compare the outputs between the reproducible builds on the open source stack and semi-open one. And we discover slight differences ...
I really like how Ben Lynn went from a C like language to building a complete Haskell compiler in umpteen steps, starting with building a virtual machine for running programs written in Combinatory Logic. He also condensed this journey into a winning IOCCC entry [2].
[1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/compiler/ ↗
[2] https://www.ioccc.org/2019/lynn/hint.html ↗
People interested in this topic should check out Miraheze, esp Past Research, below:
https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page ↗
We dumped all kinds of bootstrapped and gradual projects on that site. Everything from assembly to type-safe languages to macros to formal verification. Take your pick!
The text refers to bcompiler.tar.gz, and indeed, changing .html to .tar.gz and keeping the rest of the archive.org URL the same, you can download http://web.archive.org/web/20121030222527/http://www.rano.org/bcompiler.tar.gz ↗
What's important when bootstrapping, it is to have a set of easily audit-able code generator binaries with several alternatives (to avoid dev/vendor lock-in). That is a thing of the past. Anybody bringing on the table gcc or clang for this is only laughable matter, unfortunately.