“The Design of a Self-Compiling C Transpiler Targeting POSIX Shell” (2024)
https://doi.org/10.1145/3687997.3695639
“We have developed pnut, a C to POSIX shell transpiler written in C that generates human-readable shell code. […] Together, pnut and the shell serve as the seed for a chain of builds that create increasingly capable compilers up to the most recent version of [GCC]”
(@monnier is among the authors
I also wonder what makes the authors think “pnut can bootstrap these binaries in fewer steps and less code to audit”.
The “readable shell” part is questionable to me: I think the right way to frame it is in terms of whether the thing is source code, not whether it’s “readable”—if it’s not source, why even look at it?
Anyway, good to see the #bootstrappable community growing with a diversity of options on the table. Let’s talk!
@civodul @monnier @janneke Maybe you should start mentioning 190 bytes instead of 357
https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX/x86/hex0-seed