Binary REPL, bootstrapping and reproducibility

[Irvise]

Hi Yuriy,

I would like to ask you about the binary dependency of the repl file. In order to compile ol, the binary repl file is needed as far as I have seen. Both using the Makefile or the advance/manual method.

How is this binary file generated? I saw there is a ./libraries/scheme/repl.scm in the repo, but I doubt that it is the file that is needed to generate the ./repl binary.

I am asking because I would like to know if ol is bootstrappable. That means, whether a piece of software can be compiled from scratch or it requires some binary blobs. This is a topic that most people do not care, but I personally do. I am looking for a small Scheme implementation that could be used in the live-bootstrap project. This requires that the Scheme implementation be compilable fully from source, without any pregenerated binaries nor machine-generated files.

I have written about this topic and my goal (to create a bootstrapping compiler for GCC-Ada also known as GNAT) in here. There is this other page where I go more into the details and I have added ol for now, as I did not realise that it required the repl binary.

Could the repl binary be generated by the user from a human readable file without already having ol installed? Is that feasible to achieve?

Thank you for your time and effort! Best regards, Fer