Hi!
In June I announced Mes as a project that seeks to reduce the size of/ dependency on bootstrap binaries, esp. for a system like GuixSD.
The strategy was to create a minimal trusted binary (prototyped in C but eventually to be hand-crafted in assembly/hex) that interpets a minimal LISP. Then using this minimal but already convenient LISP, extend it into Scheme and write a tiny C compiler/linker.
Last time I had a minimal LISP-1.5-resembling interpreter in 900 lines of C that could interpret itself and an extension layer written in LISP providing a minimal Scheme environment. I was stuck on adding macros in LISP and had a broken macro implentation in C that I wanted to remove. Also I hoped to greatly reduce the size of the C part.
New status
* Provide Scheme primitives directly in 1400 lines of C
* Remove LISP-1.5 staging
* closures clue-bat, fixing bugs in begin, lambda, lexical
scoping etc. ... learned a lot!
* quasiquote, unquote, unquote-splicing (in C, too slow in Scheme)
* define-macro (in C)
* define-syntax, syntax-rules (in Scheme, using define-macro)
* all primitives needed to run LALR (strings, vectors, records,
some srfi bits; mostly in Scheme)
* test suite with 97 tests that run with Mes and also with Guile
* minimal and partial ANSI C parser for hello world
* minimal and simplistic 32 bit elf c-ast->elf generator
Mes can now create a running 32-bit elf binary from this hello
world C source with a simplistic for loop
int main ()
{
int i;
puts ("Hi Mes!\n");
for (i = 0; i < 4; ++i)
puts (" Hello, world!\n");
return 1;
}
It takes Mes 1'20" to compile this program, Guile takes 0.5 seconds.
* cannot get psyntax.pp hooked-up or running
* do not understand syntax stuff [well enough] to implement in C
-> no let-syntax, no MATCH
-> no syntax-case, no PEG parserIn theory the bootstrapping problem I set out to solve seems to be cracked. The remaining problem is reduced to `just work': implementing a minimal C compiler in Scheme. Questions here: I'm not convinced yet that this is a meaningful project...aaand I really not want to tackle this without having MATCH, which Mes does not have yet.
Of the possible directions that I see
0 write the C compiler in Scheme without match 1 rewrite match without let-syntax 2 grok+write let-syntax/syntax-case using define-macro, some bits in C 3 run and hook-up psyntax.pp...BUT that would probably require: 4 address performance problem, possibly by 5 rewrite Mes into a VM-based solution
none I find really attractive. Option 5, a VM is proven to work but that's quite a change of direction. Looking at other VM-based projects (e.g. GNU Epsilon I fear that this must result in a much larger code base in C, throwing out the minimal trusted binary idea. The other puzzles and work 0, 2 or 3 still need to be done.
However, diving into syntax-macro or eval work (2 or 3) most probably needs the performance issue addressed. And if it turns out that a big VM solution is needed, that may still invalidate this project after having done even more work.
Help! :-) Ideas?
Greetings,
janneke