Re: Blog post on the Full-Source Bootstrap

[Janneke Nieuwenhuizen]

Simon Tournier writes:

Hi Simon,

> On mer., 26 avril 2023 at 16:12, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> 
> wrote:
>
>>   
>> https://gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
>
> Really cool!

Yeah, thanks!

> Maybe I misread the wording:
>
>         If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than
>         22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program
> or
>         First, while the package graph is rooted in a 357-byte program,
>
> Well, without being the accountant, considering the “more than 22,000
> nodes”, the revision fa685c8 contains ~23,000 packages and more than
> 1700 packages depends on GHC (Haskell) which is not bootstrapped from
> this 357-byte program, AFAIK.

Yeah, IWBN if someone would fix that and make the story more accurate
;-)

> $ guix refresh -l ghc@9.2 | cut -f1 -d':'

[..]

> In addition, that’s similar for ~450 packages relying on OCaml.
>
> Bah, I am nitpicking.  Am I? :-)

Yeah, but most enjoyably so :-)  Also, it's nice to know that someone
checked we're not telling too big a lie.

> What achievement this bootstrap story!  Thanks to all the people
> involved.  Back on FOSDEM 2017, I remember “Mes -- Maxwell's Equations
> of Software An attempt at dissolving bootstrap binaries” [1].  Thanks to
> this talk, I had this kind of revelation:
>
>         Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate
>         school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on
>         the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in
>         itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”
>
>                                                             – Alan Kay – 
>
> Then, I got the point with Yogurt metaphor [2] on FOSDEM 2019.  Anyway!

Lovely.  Thanks for you comments, most appreciated!

Janneke

-- 
Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>  | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
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