Just to let you know that I have been able to fully prove
what I wanted to prove.

With UCX64 at http://pdos.org you can use the (entirely
public domain with C source code) suite to do a
self-hosting partial (minimal - C90, text-based) clone of
64-bit Windows.

Every executable, including the single EFI executable
(bootx64.efi), can be reproduced byte-exact when
compared to the same build being done on real
Win64, other than 2 modules (bootx64.efi and
cc64.exe) that have some slight floating point
differences - I believe because pdpclib was written
for hex float while Microsoft's msvcrt.dll uses IEEE
- so a few bytes slightly change.

I need to do cleanup for usability and other reasons now,
but that proves the actual concept.

Thanks a lot for that Bart! I wont' say it made my day.
I'll say instead that it made 3 decades of my life.

The public now owns an x64 OS and ability to rebuild it.

What the public does now is anyone''s guess - but I'll
guess they do nothing (noting that Linus predicted
that his product would never be as sophisticated as
Minix - something no-one in the known world has
even heard of). Which is fine by me, but at least now
that choice exists. It was a fairly strange thing to not
exist at all.

Here's what someone else (the author of pdclib,
as opposed to pdpclib) said:

https://rootdirectory.de/doku.php?id=pdclib:start

PDCLib is a project predicated on the belief that some building blocks are so fundamental that they should be available freely - free of restrictions, free of license boilerplate and free of politics.

I'm not sure what he means by "free of politics". I wouldn't
have minded if the Soviets/Chicoms had been the ones to
develop these fundamentals in an anti-capitalist move.
100 million dead from communism would be a small price
to pay for having this software.

Instead, the 100 million died for ... nothing.

Well - to me, that is exactly what "free of politics" means.
I'll accept code from Kim Jong Un himself. So long as it
was written by him and not one of his 30 million or
whatever slaves - as I'm not sure slaves can give away
something freely. Hmmm. So maybe I can't take code
from the commies after all. If it was state-funded, maybe?

It's a moot point regardless. All the code on the UCX64
and UC386 disks was given away by non-slaves. Slovakia
is free now, so the massive contribution from there was
willingly given too. Oh - there were some bug fixes and a
little bit of code from Vietnam too. But I paid them
privately for that - they weren't forced by their dictator to do it.

BFN. Paul.

On 12/09/2023 05:35, Paul Edwards wrote:
> Just to let you know that I have been able to fully prove
> what I wanted to prove.
>
> With UCX64 at http://pdos.org you can use the (entirely
> public domain with C source code) suite to do a
> self-hosting partial (minimal - C90, text-based) clone of
> 64-bit Windows.
>
> Every executable, including the single EFI executable
> (bootx64.efi), can be reproduced byte-exact when
> compared to the same build being done on real
> Win64, other than 2 modules (bootx64.efi and
> cc64.exe) that have some slight floating point
> differences - I believe because pdpclib was written
> for hex float while Microsoft's msvcrt.dll uses IEEE
> - so a few bytes slightly change.
>
> I need to do cleanup for usability and other reasons now,
> but that proves the actual concept.
>
> Thanks a lot for that Bart! I wont' say it made my day.
> I'll say instead that it made 3 decades of my life.
>

You're welcome. I'm glad somebody has found it useful (at the same time,
it makes me a little nervous!).

I'm still working on upgrading the 'bcc' compiler to the standards of my
other compilers, that's mainly for my own satisfaction. Currently that
is compiling and running a couple of dozen small programs.