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 brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to GNU Guix. This bootstrap has halved the size of opaque, uninspectable binaries that were needed to bootstrap Guix. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds effort for any interested UNIX-like operating system.
Mes 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-0.20.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.sigIf 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 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
Get informed, get involved
See https://bootstrappable.org
Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.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.