[maxdamantus]

> Without essentially a formal proof that the output of the compiler is what you expect, you will have to manually inspect every aspect of every output phase of any bootstrapping process.

And why would it be easier to manually inspect (prove correct) the output of every phase than to manually inspect (prove correct) the source code? The compiled code will often lose important information about code structure, how abstractions are used, include optimisations, etc.

I usually trust my ability to understand source code better than my ability to understand the compiled code.

[projektfu]

But you cannot trust the compiler, you said.

[maxdamantus]

That's not what I said. I've implied that it's hard to trust the output of some unknown compiler (eg, the "zig1.wasm" blob) and that it's easier to trust source code.

The Dozer article explains, under "The Descent Principle", how rustc will eventually be buildable using only source code [0] (other than a "512-byte binary seed" which implements a trivial hex interpreter). You still need to trust a computer to run everything on, though in theory it should be possible to gain trust by running it on multiple computers and checking that the result is the same (this is why any useful system bootstrapping project should also be reproducible [1]).

[0] https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

[1] https://bootstrappable.org/best-practices.html