Re: [Chicken-users] Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Cowan wrote:

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

  

So, I'm contemplating bootstrapping.  If you didn't have a chicken 
compiler already, how would you bootstrap?  
    

You wouldn't, but that almost certainly is not what happened.  Felix
probably wrote an early version of chicken and ran it on some other
Scheme -- it's not like he was devising the language from scratch.
  

I'm starting to see a CMake-ish design.  I think what I want are 2 well-defined states of development:

- given a Chicken compiler and Scheme source code, generate a canonical set of C files.

- given a C compiler and a canonical set of C files, generate a Chicken compiler.

This is not really how the current build system is set up.  These notions are mishmashed around a lot in "stage2, stage3, create a distribution," etc.  If only these 2 well-defined points of compilation existed, it would be easier to maintain.  Furthermore, CMake should implement a search capability to locate Chicken compilers.  None of this "set the magic BOOSTSTRAP_PATH" stuff.  You wouldn't care about something being "stage2" or "stage3."  You'd only care that you've found several Chicken compilers, and that you're using the most recent / appropriate one for your build.  Defaults would be reasonable, and the user could intervene to select a specific Chicken compiler if necessary.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every