The bootstrap seed, https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX..., is a tiny interpreter that takes a much larger program written in a special-purpose, bytecode-based language. This proceeds in turn once or twice more--special purpose program generating another interpreter for another special-purpose language--until you end up with a minimal Scheme interpreter, which then can be used to execute a C compiler program.

All of this is incredible work, but a minimal C-subset compiler in under 512 bytes of x86 assembly seems like a unique achievement as it includes non-trivial parsing and linking phases not required for that hex0 interpreter.

From that article:

> Even more recently (2018), the GNU C Library glibc-2.28 adds Python as a build requirement

I’m surprised they went with Python and not GNU software (e.g. Guile).

Edit: clicking through the link it sounds like this might be intended to replace other accumulated dependencies (Perl?) and stop supporting old versions of Python.

Is Nix incorporating this work as well? I fully support and want Guix to survive, but it seems well behind in mind share, and I would love if Nix could become similarly repeatable and reproducible.