A fully reproducible C toolchain rooted on POSIX shell

[Laurent Huberdeau]

Hi Simon,

It would be really great to have pnut be part of a Debian bootstrap build!

The issue you refer to is stale, pnut can now bootstrap TCC successfully.
I'm currently working on packaging the "shell-to-TCC" bootstrap so that
people can reproduce my results. You can play with the first steps of the
bootstrap process (going from the shell to an executable pnut-exe) by
following the instructions in the README[0].

Also, since a lot of activity is happening on the live-bootstrap side, I
opened a PR[1] that demonstrates how pnut can be used to bootstrap TCC and
some of the benefits it brings, such as fast bootstrap and small source
code size.

Laurent

[0]: https://github.com/udem-dlteam/pnut#reproducible-builds
[1]: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/pull/554

On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 5:07 PM Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> wrote:

> Laurent Huberdeau <laurenthuberd at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I recently finished my master's thesis[0] arguing for the use of POSIX
> > shell for diverse double-compilation and reproducible builds. It also
> > presents pnut[1], a C compiler capable of bootstrapping itself and TCC
> > (Linux i386) exclusively from any POSIX-compliant shell (bash, ksh, dash,
> > zsh, etc.) and human-readable source files.
> >
> > Curious to hear your thoughts!
>
> Wow, that is really impressive!  I'm looking into packaging for Debian,
> maybe this could be part of a bootstrap build of Debian.  But can it
> build TCC or not?  The README suggests yes but
> https://github.com/udem-dlteam/pnut/issues/63 suggests no, although it
> may be old.
>
> /Simon
>
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