Security, bootstrapping, and transparency [LWN.net]

Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Jul 29, 2021 16:45 UTC (Thu) by peter-b (guest, #66996)
In reply to: Security, bootstrapping, and transparency by civodul
Parent article: Tor gets financial support for Arti development

> Another security consideration in the choice of a language is its bootstrapping story, to reduce chances of "Trusting Trust" attack as described by Ken Thompson.

People seem to worry about bootstrapping Rust far more than they worry about bootstrapping C or C++. Are there any C++ compilers that can be compiled without a C++ compiler?

Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Aug 1, 2021 7:13 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

This is nearly ironic, because the person you're asking is involved in a large project which, among other things, tries to tackle bootstrapping in a very systematic manner.

Had you followed the Guix links given to you, you might have stumbled upon interesting things.

Here's specifically something about bootstrapping C in Guix's context:

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-see...

Actually, bootstrapping C has a long and rich history, with several minimalist C compilers being built to build more complete compilers on top.