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Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust[0] was one of the motivations for Guix's single 357-byte seed (+libguile) full bootstrap[1].

0: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

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For the 'full' graph for stage0 see: https://fransfaase.github.io/Emulator/tdiagram.html and note that it even is not completely 'full' leaving out some steps that copy file from one location to another. Use mouse or fingers to zoom and pan.

I gave a talk about this at WHY2025 which also refers to this 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' paper. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzyyO5wvm0

nice work!

kaem is a new one for me, what's its connection to mescc?

Kaem is a very minimal shell, a program that can set environment variables and start other programs using Linux system calls.

To compile GNU Mes compiler you need a minimal C compiler. Half of the steps in stage0 consist of building that minimal C compiler through a number of steps starting with a very minimal assembler. I am working on an approach that use far less steps and is easier to review than the hunderds of files that are used now.

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