Is that related to Godel's idea that a system can be either complete or inconsistent?
0: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...
I gave a talk about this at WHY2025 which also refers to this 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' paper. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzyyO5wvm0
kaem is a new one for me, what's its connection to mescc?
To compile GNU Mes compiler you need a minimal C compiler. Half of the steps in stage0 consist of building that minimal C compiler through a number of steps starting with a very minimal assembler. I am working on an approach that use far less steps and is easier to review than the hunderds of files that are used now.
I have never seen the actual examples before, but the way it's always been described to me I kind of expected more...
It was always described as completely undetectable... so my assumption was one could not find it even with a decompiler and a lot of free time...
I guess I expected for instance it to filter patterns of itself out of fread for instance, such that a system built with it literally could not detect its existence at all. I expected it to make the operating system at large lie to you.
A better approach is to start with a small executable, one that translate hexadecimal numbers to binary, and from that build all the tools to compile a simple C compiler (such as the Tiny C Compiler, which is not very tiny), to compile the optimizing C compiler that can compile operating systems. That is the approach followed by the live-bootstrap project.
Understatement of the eon
fjfaase•3mo ago