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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> the amount of assembly you need drops massively

How about this as a compromise: use GCC, with all its flags, to generate the assembly, and just use that? Skip the messy transition step.

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And what would this change, if authors are working off of the GCC-C files? If you're after a system by which you don't need GCC to run Linux, you may be interested in a concept known as "binaries" which sounds remarkably close to what you're trying to invent here

They're not working off the C files. They're using the assembly files when performing the actual compilation going forward; using GCC is just a bootstrap to get the necessary assembly churned out quickly.

But.. there C files has changed hundreds of times, for tens of architectures, over tens of years. Who is going to want to edit 20 (or more) assembly files when a change is made? How do you add a new architecture? Do you have to keep the C files up to date and somehow check the different assembly files don't drift out of sync?

Instead we could just mark some files as "These C files have to be run with GCC versions X to Y", problem solved. Then why not just compile everything with those versions of GCC?

> Instead we could just mark some files as "These C files have to be run with GCC versions X to Y", problem solved.

Is it solved? You'd still have to check the generated assembly of the entire file after every change you make, to make sure it didn't have some knock-on effect that optimised something differently, even if you kept the version of the compiler the same.

And is GCC deterministic? I don't know - do you? Did you know it has a flag `-frandom-seed`?

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