Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:21:57 +0100
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Thoughts on self-hosting compilers in Alpine
From: =?UTF-8?Q?S=C3=B6ren?= Tempel <soeren@soeren-tempel.net>
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Timo Teras <timo.teras@iki.fi> wrote:
> So there used to be separate go-bootstrap package which enabled
> bootstrapping with C-compiler, but that seems to have been removed in
> commit 895fcea724edcb357cd2b0da3b64d36155b159d4. This was the latest go
> that did not require go to build.

Correct, I was the maintainer of this package. As discussed in this ML
thread, bootstrapping via Go 1.4 (as previously packaged by
go-bootstrap) does not work with architectures that are not supported by
the 1.4 release (e.g. riscv64 or ppc64le). For this reason, I added a
package for gcc-go in commit b93b0b134f7d10720a4359579ff4f55575ac90e3.

> I am not sure if it would be possible to bootstrap go with gcc-go? But
> there might exist also some other paths.

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.

> 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.

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.

Greetings,
S=C3=B6ren