[rb-general] GNU Mes 0.20 released

Mon Sep 9 21:06:56 UTC 2019

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.20, representing
147 commits over 38 weeks.

Mes has now brought the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to Guix (bootstrap
a GNU/Linux system without binary GNU toolchain or equivalent).  It
should land in Guix master any day now: a big thank you to everyone who
helped, notably Ludovic and Mark.

This release is a step towards the upcoming Scheme-only bootstrap and
bringing Mes into NixOS and Debian.  This effort is now sponsored by
NLnet[12].

Next targets:

 - ARM support
 - Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for ARM
 - Scheme-only bootstrap: use Guile and Gash to remove bash,
   coreutils&co, grep, sed, etc. from the Guix bootstrap binaries
 - mes-m2: port Mes.c to M2-Planet
 - Introduce Reduced Binaries Seed bootstrap to NixOS
 - Debian?
 - Hurd

Packages are available in Guix master.

* About

  GNU Mes[0] brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap[1] to GNU Guix[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 Guix 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-0.20.tar.gz
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.20.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.20.tar.gz
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.20.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  df839a83e4a2ad6c2a4accc5bf17b1a7  mes-0.20.tar.gz
  38d4cb3fa28fa1f5fc57fea9e046d4d8052bbb8c  mes-0.20.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-0.20.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.

* Changes in 0.20 since 0.19
 ** Core
 *** The build system has been simplified, again.
 Mes now builds ootb on Debian.
 *** Mes now supports -c EXPR.
 ** Divide by zero is now flagged.
 ** Language
 *** 1 new function:
 take-while.
 ** MesCC
 *** The C libraries have been exploded into one function per file.
 *** MesCC now has enhanced POSIX/gcc comand line support, e.g. -DFOO=1,
 -nodefaultlibs, -nostartfiles, -nostdlib.
 *** The archiver is now called `mesar'.
 *** MesCC now supports Nyacc-0.99.
 *** MesCC now depends on MesCC-Tools 0.6.0.
 *** 1 new function
 __mesabi_uldiv.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** interger division has been fixed.
 *** isatty now looks at terminfo.
 *** signal now uses sigaction correctly for non-x86.
 *** string->number now support #x hex-prefix.
 *** ungetc now has a buffer per file handle.

Greetings,
janneke and Danny.

[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
[12] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes

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