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@underscores@kolektiva.social

wiki-user: underscores

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It makes sense that if you’re designing a language, you’d like the language you made and would want to use it. It’s fine for compilers like that to exist, and even be the main one used, but ideally it shouldn’t be the only compiler.

    But there are technically ways to bootstrap a language without writing it in another language (other than a small core in assembly or something). You could design a tiny compiler that only handles a small subset of your language, then write a better compiler using only the features available in that subset. You can do this for several layers of compilers until you have the full language.


  • That’s already how it is now, we just don’t usually think of it that way. You can’t compile rust unless you already have a rust compiler. The current version was compiled in a previous version, which was compiled in a previous version, going through a chain of older versions and other languages. Anything along that chain could’ve theoretically had an influence on the current compiler.

    It’s not about the code itself being more trustworthy. The point is that when you bootstrap, you don’t have to blindly trust any of the binaries, since it’s source code the whole way down. Someone could bootstrap rustc like this, compare it to the binaries that already exist, and ideally they would be identical.




  • You can technically do it, but it’s a convoluted path. The article talks about it. Basically to bootstrap that way you need to go through a lot of versions of rust, compile rust 0.7 in ocaml, compile ocaml in scheme, and compile scheme in C using gcc. For gcc you need to compile a chain of versions back to when it was written in C instead of C++, plus the whole TinyCC bootstrapping path.

    edit: had listed scala instead of ocaml


  • The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

    Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

    So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.










  • There’s still tons of people who will judge you for having children without getting married. A lot of religious groups still consider it a moral failure. And even if it was completely accepted now, it still became an insult in the first place because of that stigma, and you’d still be using it within that historical context. You can’t reclaim a slur by continuing to use it as an insult and ignoring where it comes from.

    As an example, I’ve seen pretty many people use slurs for Romani people as a term for getting scammed or cheated. Usually they didn’t know the origin of the term, and didn’t mean any harm by it. They had heard it being used and assumed it was just another word. But you don’t just accept the definition these people have in their heads as an alternate definition, disconnected from the original. It has the meaning it does based on bigoted stereotypes, and by using it they’re still spreading that, even if they aren’t hateful themselves.




  • Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

    Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.


  • If you check “I’m an advanced user” in the settings, then hit the “More” button in the dropdown a few times it’ll show the more advanced interface that lets you choose which third party domains to allow. It doesn’t work quite the same since it blocks both content and scripts per site, but I find it good enough for my usage.

    edit: You can technically block just scripts per 3rd party site, but it involves manually editing the content type for your rules in the settings. It’s not part of the main interface, so I never bother using it.