DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 10:42 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by pabs
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

What is important about it though? Bootstrapping via so much source code that you can't review it all doesn't give you anything useful over having to trust binaries.

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 2:55 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

Binaries are unreviewable by most people, so it is better to start from smaller binaries to reduce the chance of them containing backdoors. The CREV folks are working on socially scalable cryptographically verifiable code review to solve the review problem:

https://github.com/crev-dev/

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 4, 2022 16:20 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> Binaries are unreviewable by most people, so it is better to start from smaller binaries to reduce the chance of them containing backdoors.

Great! Tell me how you plan to exclude huge binaries written in Verilog and VHDL (and then backed in ASICs you actually use) and then you would have a point.

The truth is: from practical POV bootstrapability is just a gimmick which buys you nothing since free hardware doesn't exist (please don't bring a FS's joke which certifies a hardware which includes megabytes of binary code which handles the storage, that is: precisely the part which you, somehow, need to trust to run anything at all).

Today so much proprietary code is executed before and after the first bytes of code you may actually control is executed that the whole excercise is mostly pointless.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 5, 2022 7:09 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I do not know how they plan to approach it, but the Bootstrappable Builds folks definitely have thought about those things, I have definitely seen discussions on their channel about bootstrapping hardware from scratch. They are nothing if not ambitious.