Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2021 13:31:27 +0200
From: Timo Teras <timo.teras@iki.fi>
To: =?UTF-8?B?U8O2cmVu?= Tempel <soeren@soeren-tempel.net>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Thoughts on self-hosting compilers in Alpine
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On Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:21:57 +0100
S=C3=B6ren Tempel <soeren@soeren-tempel.net> wrote:

> > I am not sure if it would be possible to bootstrap go with gcc-go?
> > But there might exist also some other paths. =20
>=20
> Yes, that should be possible and that's exactly what I would like to
> do for Go. I just haven't gotten around to fixing all the minor
> issues with the gcc-go based bootstrap process yet.

Cool!

> > But as discussed in the thread, it seems each compiler has unique
> > requirements on how to bootstrap it. Granted, this is getting
> > painful as the number of self-dependent programming languages
> > increase. And for some language full bootstrap just is not feasible
> > which makes things quite annoying. =20
>=20
> Right, I would just like to make the bootstrap process transparent. So
> for example, just by looking at community/go/APKBUILD it is entirely
> unclear how Go was bootstrapped initially for the riscv64 or ppc64le
> architecture.

So community/go supports cross-building for bootstrapping. x86_64
system was used to cross-build go for those target as go-bootstrap.

I am not sure if the cross-built go has functional differences or not.
But during first native build round go would then get rebuilt natively
by the earlier cross-built compiler.

This kind of cross-built bootstrapping is often used for new targets.
And this is how e.g. gcc is bootstrapped for new systems too.

Timo