[rb-general] GNU Mes 0.18 released

Sun Oct 7 17:18:54 CEST 2018

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.18, representing
83 commits over 8 weeks.

Mes is now bringing a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to GuixSD; the
size of bootstrap binaries has been halved and no regular toolchain
binaries are used as binary seeds (i686-linux and x86_64-linux only).

MesCC has been refactored to use an abstracted assembly language and
can now (cross-)build x86_64 binaries.

Next targets:

 - reduce the 1MB ASCII M1 seed to ~5000 LOC/~100KB of M2 source
 - revive Gash/Geesh and use it to decimate the remaining bootstrap
   binary seeds
 - and/or otherwise reduce the bootstrap binaries
 - ARM, the Hurd?

Packages are available from Guix's core-updates-next branch.

* About

  GNU Mes[0] brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap[1] to GuixSD[2] and
  potentially to any other interested GNU/Linux distribution, and aims
  to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the
  bootstrappable builds[3] effort.

  It consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter written in
  ~5,000 LOC of simple C and a Nyacc-based C compiler written in Scheme.
  This mes.c is being simplified[4] to be transpiled by M2-Planet[5].

  The Scheme interpreter (mes.c) has a Garbage Collector, a library of
  loadable Scheme modules-- notably Dominique Boucher's LALR[6], Pre-R6RS
  [portable syntax-case[7] with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's Nyacc[8] --and test
  suite just barely enough to support a simple REPL and simple
  C-compiler: MesCC.

  Mes+MesCC can compile an only lightly patched TinyCC[9] that is
  self-hosting.  Using this tcc and the Mes C library we now have a
  Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for the gnutools triplet: glibc-2.2.5,
  binutils-2.20.1, gcc-2.95.3.  This is enough to bootstrap GuixSD for
  i686-linux and x86_64-linux.

  Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5[10] -- John
  McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and
  Jeremiah Orians's stage0[11] ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler.

* Download

  git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.git

  Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.18.tar.gz
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.18.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.18.tar.gz
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.18.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  f9f901f175fbc8a5a3d90c9c551ccc8c  mes-0.18.tar.gz
  4f7612731a745ebb806548186453d55e0d0bf217  mes-0.18.tar.gz

  [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
  .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
  and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

    gpg --verify mes-0.18.tar.gz.sig

  If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
  then run this command to import it:

    gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273

  and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Mes runs from the source tree and can also be built, packaged and
installed in Guix[SD] from a git checkout by running

    guix package -f .guix.scm

* Get informed, get involved

    Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.

* Changes in 0.18 since 0.17.1
 ** Core
 *** Mes/MesCC now supports x86_64.
 *** Mes/MesCC now brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to GuixSD.
 ** Language
 *** fold-right now supports 3 lists.
 ** MesCC
 *** MesCC now supports x86_64 (also as cross build), using -m 64.
 *** Mes C Library now has better support for bootstrapping gcc-3.0.
 *** Mes C test suite now has 178 tests; 74 tests were added.
 *** MesCC has been refactored to support use an abstracted assembly language.
 *** MesCC now uses Nyacc 0.86.0.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** scaffold/tests/7s-struct-short.c has been fixed.
* Changes in 0.17.1 since 0.17
 ** MesCC
 *** Mes C Library has now been exploded into a separate C file per function.
 *** Mes C Library now bootstraps glibc-2.16.0, binutils-2.20.1, gcc-4.7.4.
 *** Mes C Library now supports compiling make-3.82.
 *** Mes C Library now supports compiling diffutils-2.7.
 *** Mes C Library now supports x86_64.
 **** 7 new functions
 chdir, clock_gettime, closedir, execl, opendir, readdir, time.
 **** 5 new stubs
 getlogin, setlocale, setvbuf, sigaddset, sigblock.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** qsort can now handle lists with duplicate entries.

Greetings,
janneke

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes
[1] http://joyofsource.com/reduced-binary-seed-bootstrap.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix
[3] https://bootstrappable.org
[4] https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2
[5] https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet
[6] https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm
[7] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html
[8] https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc
[9] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[10] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
[11] https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke at gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
Freelance IT http://JoyofSource.com | Avatar® http://AvatarAcademy.com
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