We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.19, representing 100 commits over 10 weeks.

Mes has now brought the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to Guix (bootstrap a GNU/Linux system without binary GNU toolchain or equivalent) and work is ongoing to audit and verify this bootstrap path in NixOS.

This release introduces strings as byte-array, hash-tables and native structs. While that does increase the footprint somewhat, it fixes our performance issue; tinycc is now compiled in ~8min (WAS: ~1h30).

Next targets:

• translate mes.c into unsnarfed mes.M2
• use Gash to remove bash, coreutils&co, grep, sed, tar from the Guix bootstrap binaries
• replace the NixOS bootstrap
• use dietlibc, uClibc, ... for bootstrapping GNU (bash, binutils, gcc, tar) and remove Mes C lib+gnu?
• bootstrap gcc-3.x or 4.x directly, drop initial gcc-2.95.3 target?
• have M1+hex2 create gcc/tcc-usable object files? archives?
• Debian?
• ARM, the Hurd?

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

About

GNU Mes brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to Guix and potentially to any other interested GNU/Linux distribution, and aims to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds 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 to be transpiled by M2-Planet.

The Scheme interpreter (mes.c) has a Garbage Collector, a library of loadable Scheme modules-- notably Dominique Boucher's LALR, Pre-R6RS portable syntax-case with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's Nyacc --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 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 -- John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and Jeremiah Orians's stage0 ~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-0.19.tar.gz
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.19.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:

https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

99e134df87adc5fc5fd2c04941929c23  mes-0.19.tar.gz
c9781b3b6a814acc985c2ac68caa111a56583bca  mes-0.19.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-0.19.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

See https://bootstrappable.org
Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.

Changes in 0.19 since 0.18

• Core

  • The build system has been simplified.
  • Mes now prints a backtrace upon error.
  • Performance has been improved 2-8 times, making Mes 2-10 times slower than Guile.
  • Mes now supports a module type and uses a `boot-module'.
  • Mes now supports a hash_table type.
  • Mes now supports a struct type.
  • Mes now supports building a %bootstrap-mes seed from Guix.

• Language

  • Records are now implemented using struct (WAS: vector).
  • 44 new functions ceil, char-downcase, char-set-adjoin, char-set-complement, char-upcase, current-time, delete-file, dup, dup2, file-exists?, floor, frame-printer, get-internal-run-time, getcwd, gettimeofday, hash, hash-ref, hash-set!, hash-table-printer, hashq, hashq-get-handle, hashq-ref, hashq-set, inexact->exact, make-hash-table, make-stack, make-struct, module-define!, module-printer, module-ref, module-variable, read-line, round, stack-length, stack-ref, string-downcase, string-tokenize, string-upcase, struct-length, struct-ref, struct-set! struct-vtable, struct-vtable, with-error-to-file.

• MesCC

  • Assembly defines have been cleaned-up: duplicates deleted, missing added, wrong fixed.

  • MesCC now supports compiling GNU Bash and GNU Tar.

    • 6 New functions getegid, geteuid, getppid, setgid, setuid, sigdelset, sigprocmask.
    • 22 New macros EACCES, ENOSPC, ESPIPE, INT16_MAX, INT16_MIN, INT32_MAX, INT32_MIN, INT64_MAX, INT64_MIN, INT8_MAX, INT8_MIN, LLONG_MAX, LLONG_MIN, SIZE_MAX SYS_getegid, SYS_geteuid, SYS_setgid SYS_setuid, S_IRGRP, S_IROTH, S_IRWXG, S_IRWXO S_ISGID, S_ISUID, S_IWGRP, S_IWOTH, S_IXGRP, S_IXOTH, UINT16_MAX, UINT32_MAX, UINT64_MAX, UINT8_MAX, _POSIX_VERSION.

• Noteworthy bug fixes

  • Mes now supports characters #\xNN.

  • Mes now supports assq-ref and assoc-ref with alist == #f.

  • Mes now support \xNN in strings. Fixes using Nyacc-0.86.0.

  • MesCC now supports the unary plus operator.

  • MesCC now supports the `U' integer suffix.

  • MesCC now comes with INTnn_MIN/MAX, UINTnn defines in stdint.h.

  • MesCC now always exits non-zero when assembler or linker fail.

Greetings, janneke

1. GNU Mes
2. GuixSD
3. bootstrappable builds
4. being simplified
5. M2-Planet
6. LALR
7. portable syntax-case
8. Nyacc
9. bootstrappable TinyCC
10. LISP-1.5
11. stage0