Which Build Tool For A Bootstrappable Project? | Blog | jackkelly.name
I have a nascent side project which is intended to participate in a bootstrap chain. This means it shouldn’t depend on too many things, that the transitive closure of its build dependencies must also be small, and at no point in the process should any build depend on an opaque binary blob.
Choices on the language side are pretty constrained. Zig is currently not a candidate (despite the language itself being rather promising), because it has removed its C++-based bootstrap in favour of keeping a WASM-based build of a previous compiler version. It’s great that their compiler output is reproducible — Zig-built-by-Zig is byte-for-byte identical with Zig-built-via-WASM — but for now, it’s not truly bootstrappable. (Andrew Kelley says he hopes someone writes a Zig compiler in C when Zig stabilises. I sincerely hope this happens.)
One big downside is losing the ability to build any commit from source without meta-complexity creeping in. For example, let’s say that you are trying to do git bisect. At some point, git checks out an older commit, but the script fails to build from source because the binary that is being used to build the compiler is now the wrong version. Sure, this can be addressed, but this introduces unwanted complexity that contributors would rather not deal with.
