Re:Bootstrapping Rust
by pjmlp on Thursday December 11, 2014 @07:19AM
(#8734327)
The P-Code used by some Pascal compilers never was intended to be a fully Pascal VM, rather a porting tool.
Niklaus Wirth idea was to have a portable assembly that he could use to easily bootstrap the compiler.
So porting to a new platform meant:
- setting the output format to P-Code
- compile the compiler
- write a P-Code interpreter without any attention to performance
- use it to run the compiler until the new native backend is done
This was specially important back in the day each OS had as option their own proprietary system programming language or Assembly.
Personally I like this option (using interpreters as porting tool) better than cross-compiling, as you can work directly on the target system, except in embedded platforms case.
Niklaus Wirth idea was to have a portable assembly that he could use to easily bootstrap the compiler.
So porting to a new platform meant:
- setting the output format to P-Code
- compile the compiler
- write a P-Code interpreter without any attention to performance
- use it to run the compiler until the new native backend is done
This was specially important back in the day each OS had as option their own proprietary system programming language or Assembly.
Personally I like this option (using interpreters as porting tool) better than cross-compiling, as you can work directly on the target system, except in embedded platforms case.