On 8/16/2012 8:26 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
Ideally, you'd want as narrow a bootstrapping channel as possible.
I guess I tend to think that, too, and I'm pretty sure it's correct. But I don't normally think about why, and since you've prompted me to do so, perhaps it's a good moment to interject the fairly obvious, but amusingly contrary notion that there is too much of a good thing to be had in this dimension.
I suppose the main reason to want a minimal pre-bootstrap tool-chain is to maximize repeatability, minimize platform quirks, maximize time-stability in the face of changing code bases, and so forth.
Plus... you know... it's a lot more likely to make somebody say "Wow!" the "narrow" way. Which maybe sounds like I'm poking fun, but I do actually think there's some intrinsic value in that.
However, there /are/ also reasons to make the bootstrap-er machine more fat and complex. Most of them boiling down to there only being so much time in a day.
Otherwise we would boot-strap from stage -10, consisting only of a sed script and some architecture files to generate crude asm lexers ....
:) -gmt
