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wiki-user: underscores

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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Mozilla is set up as a non-profit with a for profit company as a subsidiary. The corporate Mozilla handles working on Firefox, mostly using money from Google for setting it as the default search engine. Because of that separation I don’t think they can easily mix those two piles of money together.

    There’s this section from their FAQ:

    Don’t Mozilla products, like Firefox, earn income?

    Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.








  • It makes sense that if you’re designing a language, you’d like the language you made and would want to use it. It’s fine for compilers like that to exist, and even be the main one used, but ideally it shouldn’t be the only compiler.

    But there are technically ways to bootstrap a language without writing it in another language (other than a small core in assembly or something). You could design a tiny compiler that only handles a small subset of your language, then write a better compiler using only the features available in that subset. You can do this for several layers of compilers until you have the full language.


  • That’s already how it is now, we just don’t usually think of it that way. You can’t compile rust unless you already have a rust compiler. The current version was compiled in a previous version, which was compiled in a previous version, going through a chain of older versions and other languages. Anything along that chain could’ve theoretically had an influence on the current compiler.

    It’s not about the code itself being more trustworthy. The point is that when you bootstrap, you don’t have to blindly trust any of the binaries, since it’s source code the whole way down. Someone could bootstrap rustc like this, compare it to the binaries that already exist, and ideally they would be identical.




  • You can technically do it, but it’s a convoluted path. The article talks about it. Basically to bootstrap that way you need to go through a lot of versions of rust, compile rust 0.7 in ocaml, compile ocaml in scheme, and compile scheme in C using gcc. For gcc you need to compile a chain of versions back to when it was written in C instead of C++, plus the whole TinyCC bootstrapping path.

    edit: had listed scala instead of ocaml


  • The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

    Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

    So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.







  • Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

    Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.