Ekaitz's tech blog

I want to send email I have a server, I want it to send email.

The goal of this whole project has always been to make a faster version of GNU Mes.

In the last blogpost I proposed a solution for all our problems, the bootstrapping, the stacked evaluators, proper hygiene… A wish come true!

Since the last post, where I had lots of thoughts and questions but a few answers, I wrote a lot of things and changed the interpreter several times.

Since the last post, where I described the module system and I introduced a few loose ends and a memory error, I continued with the philosophy I also introduced before: “just pretend it works”.

In the previous post I promised that I was going to talk about the module system.

In the previous blogpost in the series I introduced macro expansion and left a couple of things in the air, specially the module system and its inner workings.

In our previous blogpost we talked about GNU Mes’ garbage collector and we left some cliffhanger in the end, saying that we’d need to use that for the macro expansion and I was having a really hard time with it.

In our previous blogpost in the series we described how GNU Mes’ scheme interpreter handles evaluation and how fast it was.

Before1 starting our work in the project we should, first, make sure that we know that our hypothesis is true and GNU Mes could be faster and, second, try to understand where we could improve the execution speed.

It has been recent news that Nlnet and NGI0-Core decided to support me for working on GNU Mes but I didn’t really share the motivation behind this proposal and my personal goals with it yet.

Guix London1 gave me the chance to talk about this whole bootstrapping process and I delivered.

No need to say that during the last 2 years part of my efforts trying to give people a better world, using my engineering skills, have been funded by the European Union with the NGI programme, which I was granted by NLNet.

During the latest posts I described that we managed to build GCC using our bootstrapping chain, and also that we built a modern GCC using our bootstrapped one, but now, some connection work has been done.

In latest posts we talked about many things: problems, our changes to other projects and other things.

In previous episodes we talked about getting sidetracked and we mentioned we needed to build Musl because we had limitations in our standard library.

Short post now, following what we did in previous episodes where we explained how to build it and run it in Debian, now we can run it in Guix thanks to Efraim Flashner’s help.

Takerufuji Mikiya, born as Ishioka Mikiya in 1999, loves sumo.

There are many software projects involved in our bootstrapping process, not only compilers!

I already mentioned at the FOSDEM-2024 that we built GCC 4.6.4 in a Debian machine in real RISC-V hardware, but I didn’t explain the specifics.

This year I gave a talk at FOSDEM, summarizing our work on the Guix bootstrapping for RISC-V, so I decided to get a couple of free days more and also visit the Guix Days, that where happening before the FOSDEM itself.

Some months later, it’s time to talk about the post I made about writing software for windows, without windows because I put some of those things in practice.

The other day in the fediverse a friend of mine asked me about Protonmail.

So, some merging and releasing has been done so we need to update a little bit on what we talked about in the previous blog post.

It’s been a while since the latest technical update in the project and I am fully aware that you were missing it so it’s time to recap with a really cool announcement: We finally made a self-hosted Bootstrappable TinyCC in RISC-V Most of you probably reme…

I might become a little bit famous in this small world of Guix, RISC-V and bootstrapping after my FOSDEM talk of this year and the work I did during 2021 and 2022, that you can follow in this series of posts I’m going on with right now.

I hate Windows.

In the series we already introduced GCC, TinyCC, Mes and Mes’s TinyCC fork that is designed to be bootstrappable.

In the series we already introduced GCC, made it able to compile C programs and so on, but we didn’t solve how to build that GCC with a simpler compiler.

In the series we already introduced GCC, and we already shared how I backported the RISC-V support from the GCC core to GCC-4.6.4.

In the series we already introduced GCC, its internals, and the work I’m doing to make it able to bootstrap on RISC-V.

In the previous post of the series we introduced GCC and how it generates assembly code and we left a question unanswered: “Why is learning about ELF interesting if GCC generates assembly?”.

In the previous post of the series the problem of the GCC bootstrapping was introduced.

You probably already know about how I spent more than a year having fun with RISC-V and software bootstrapping from source.

Machine code generation sounded like a weird magic to me half a year ago, I swear, but now it doesn’t look so disturbingly complicated.

Stage0 is a crazy project that is pretty well aligned with our vision of trust, bootstrappable software and whatnot.

In the latest post I summarized the last year because I wanted to talk about what I’m doing now.

It’s been a while since the previous post here, and it’s not because I don’t have anything to talk about.

Having some rest these days after some really hardworking months… I decided I wanted to solve something that was on my to-do list for a long time.

In a previous post I already talked about why I consider important to donate money or time to Free Software projects.

I consider my work part of my responsibility to make this world a better place so since the early beginning of the company I decided to donate as much as I could to the free software projects I was using for my work in order to help the ecosystem be susta…

Saludos, Hoy 18 de febrero de 2020 ha empezado la campaña de ElenQ Publishing y me gustaría hablar un poco sobre ello. http://goteo.org/project/elenq-publishing La plataforma En primer lugar, me gustaría destacar la plataforma en la que se ha publicado: h…

Hi all, This 18th of February of 2020 the crowdfunding campaign of ElenQ Publishing started and I’d like to talk a bit about it. http://en.goteo.org/project/elenq-publishing The platform First of all, I want to talk you about the crowdfunding platform: ht…

Since this afternoon this blog has a way to change between dark and light themes.

When you battle using your arguments that’s called a discussion… That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for a couple of days with ffmpeg: I’ve been using arguments trying to reach an understanding.

I’ve been recently playing with Scheme, reading R⁷RS and so on and I found something really interesting: Even with its high level of abstraction, it doesn’t hide the complexity and makes you pay attention to it.

The previous post introduced termios as a native interface to configure the terminal input processing.

This software have been introduced as a Gopher client but, as you can probably deduce from the previous post, the Gopher part is probably the simplest one.

As the project’s goal was to create a Gopher client, it was time to understand something about the protocol and read the RFC.

When you do a hack (or even a dirty hack) you do it for some reason.