mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.23

Subject: GNU Mes 0.23 released

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We are happy to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.23, representing 125
commits over one year by four people.

Mes was ported to ARM and can now be used in the GNU Guix Reduced Binary
Seed bootstrap as described here

    https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25/

and now also for armhf-linux and aarch-linux.  Work to integrate this
into Guix is ongoing: tinycc and gcc-core-2.95.3 have been built.

We are excited that the Nlnet Foundation is now sponsoring this work!

Enjoy,
Janneke and Danny.

* About

  GNU Mes[0] is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the
  GNU System.  Since version 0.22 it has again helped to halve the size of
  opaque, uninspectable binary seeds that are currently being used in the
  Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap[1] of GNU Guix[2].  The final goal is to
  help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable
  builds[3] effort for UNIX-like operating systems.

  The Scheme interpreter is written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C, and the C
  compiler written in Scheme and these are mutual self-hosting.  This
  mes.c is now being simplified to be transpiled by M2-Planet[4].

  Mes has a Garbage Collector, a library of loadable Scheme modules--
  notably Dominique Boucher's LALR[5], Pre-R6RS portable syntax-case[6]
  with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's Nyacc[7] --and test suite, just
  enough to support a REPL and a C99 compiler: mescc.

  Mes + MesCC + Mes C Library can build a bootstrappable TinyCC[8] 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, x86_64-linux, armhf-linux and aarch64-linux.

  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] ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler.

  We are very grateful to NLNet for sponsoring the Reduced Binary Seed
  bootstrap[11] and the ARM port[12].

* 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-0.23.tar.gz
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.23.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.23.tar.gz
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.23.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

    e9a0ae6e2c3842cf57fccb54909463ba  mes-0.23.tar.gz
    0560879358e5a980f7374844c495c92014b47878  mes-0.23.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-0.23.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.

* NEWS
 * Changes in 0.23 since 0.22
 ** Core
 *** Mes and Mes C Library can now be built with GCC 10.x.
 ** MesCC
 *** The Mes C Library now supports an armhf-linux bootstrap.
 *** MesCC now supports ARM.
 *** mini.c library was split into _exit.c, and _write.c.
 *** When building with GCC, -lgcc is now used.
 *** MesCC now has it's own support library libmescc.a (-lmescc).
 *** MesCC now requires mescc-tools-0.7.0 or later for ARM.
 *** MesCC can be now built with nyacc-1.00.2:
 note that nyacc-1.03.0 is not (backwards) compatible.
 *** MesCC can be built with Guile 3.0.x:
 See https://bugs.gnu.org/43831; use guild compile -O1 with Guile 3.0.x.
 *** MesCC now raises SIGABRT on abort, if supported.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** unreadchar on EOF is now a no-op.
 *** malloc now aligns the blocks it gives out to max_align_t.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes
[1] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix
[3] https://bootstrappable.org
[4] https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet
[5] https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm
[6] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html
[7] https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc
[8] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[9] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
[10] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0
[11] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes
[12] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-arm