mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.15

Subject: Mes 0.15 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Mes 0.15, representing 45
commits over 3 weeks.  The GNU toolchain is getting bootstrapped!

As of 0.14, Mes+MesCC compiles a self-hosting TinyCC.  Using the 0.15
Mes C library, this TinyCC can build the GNU tools triplet:
binutils-2.14, gcc-2.95.3, glibc-2.2.5.

This means that we can build a GNU toolchain that depends only on a
critical 1MB ASCII M1 seed.  GuixSD currently uses a ~250MB binary
seed to build gcc.

Next targets are: upstream the Mes bootstrap to GuixSD, build a
Gcc-4.7 and Glibc-2.23, bootstrap utilities like bison, flex, grep,
sed..., replace GuixSD's bootstrap for x86 and reduce the 1MB ASCII M1
seed to ~5000 LOC/~100KB of M2 source, which is a restricted subset of
C.

Packages are available from Guix's wip-bootstrap branch.

* About

    Mes[0] aims to help create full source bootstrapping for GuixSD[1]
    as part of the bootstrappable builds[2] project.

    It currently consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter
    prototype in C and a Nyacc-based C compiler in Scheme.  This C
    prototype is being simplified to be transpiled by M2-Planet[3].

    The Scheme interpreter prototype (mes.c) has a Garbage Collector,
    a library of loadable Scheme modules-- notably Dominique Boucher's
    LALR[4], pre-R6RS portable syntax-case[5] with R7RS ellipsis, Matt
    Wette's Nyacc[6], Guile's PEG[7] --and test suite just barely
    enough to support a simple REPL (repl.mes) and simple C-compiler
    MesCC.

    Mes+MesCC can compile an only slightly patched TinyCC[8] that is
    self-hosting.  Using the Mes C library, this tcc can now build the
    GNU tools triplet: binutils-2.14, gcc-2.95.3, glibc-2.2.5.

    Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5[9]
    -- John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging
    transparency and Jeremiah Orians's stage0[10] ~300 byte self-hosting
    hex assembler.

* Download

    git clone https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes

    wget https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes/-/archive/v0.15/mes-0.15.tar.gz

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

    guix package -f guix.scm

* Changes in 0.15 since 0.14
 ** Core
 *** Support fork, exec, waitpid.
 *** Boot-0 loading has been refactored.
 *** MesCC now has out of the box Geiser support.
 ** Language
 *** 2 new functions
 drop, drop-right.
 ** MesCC
 *** MesCC and Mes Lib C can now build binutils-2.30, gcc-2.95.3 and glibc-2.2.5.
 *** MesCC now provides dummy crti.o, crtn.o so that tcc needs not be patched for those.
 *** Mes Lib C now supports compiling glibc-2.2.25.
 *** Mes Lib C now supports compiling gcc-2.95.3
 *** Mes Lib C now supports compiling binutils-2.30.
 *** Mes Lib C now supports compiling m4-1.4.
 *** Mes Lib C has been split into archs: gcc, x86-mes-gcc and x86-mes.
 *** MesCC now has a posixy command line interface.
 **** 70 new functions
 abs, access, alarm, alloca, atexit, atol, bcmp, bcopy, brk, bzero,
 chmod, clearerr, close, dup, dup2, execve, fabs, fcntl, fdgets, feof,
 fgets, fileno, fork, freopen, fscanf, fstat, fsync, getcwd, getgid,
 getpid, getrusage, getuid, index, ioctl, isalnum, isalpha, isascii,
 iscntrl, isprint, ispunct, kill, link, lseek, lstat, mkdir, mktemp,
 nanosleep, open, perror, pipe, raise, read, rename, rindex, rmdir,
 sbrk, sbrk, setitimer, signal, sleep, stat, strcspn, strdup, strerror,
 strncat, strpbrk, strspn, unlink, unsetenv, waitpid.
 **** 23 new stubs
 abort, atof, bsearch, bsearch, chown, ctime, fpurge, freadahead,
 frexp, getpwnam, gmtime, mbstowcs, pclose, popen, rewind, setbuf,
 sigsetmask, strftime, sys_siglist, system, times, umask, utime.
 **** 10 new C tests
 51-strcmp.c, 70-printf.c, 87-sscanf.c, 90-strpbrk.c, 91-fseek.c,
 92-stat.c, 93-fread-fwrite.c, 94-unsetenv.c, 95-signal.c, 96-strto.c.


Greetings,
janneke

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