mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.20

Subject: GNU Mes 0.20 released

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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.

* 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.

[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://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0
[12] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes