How do you bootstrap a trusted computing base? I suspect you'd want a C compiler that was small enough that you could read the entire disassembly and verify that it worked as expected. That seems intractable.
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Computing optimal 8501 instructions for rotations using an SMT solver and Racket with Rosette:
Difftastic is effectively computing the "tree edit distance" between two ASTs, and there's a bunch of papers on this topic. Literature review is hard though: sometimes a paper takes a while to digest, only to realise that they're solving a slightly different problem.
Modern computer systems are hard to bootstrap. If you had to rebuild computing from older tech (say 20/30/40 years old), which would you prefer?