mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.16

Subject: Mes 0.16 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Mes 0.16, representing 27
commits over 2 weeks.

A most annoying ELF header bug was fixed that suddenly had all Mes
binaries segfault before entering `_start' on Linux 4.17 and later.

We now have binutils-2.20.1 and gcc-4.1.0, both compiled with
gcc-2.95.3 and glibc-2.2.5.

This reduced-binary-seed bootstrap still depends on these bootstrap
binaries: BOOTSTRAP-GUILE, flex, bash, bzip2, coreutils, diffutils,
gawk, grep, gzip, make, sed, tar, on the small binary seeds:
tinycc-seed, mescc-seed and on the mes.M1 ASCII seed.

Next targets:

 - build a Gcc 4.7 and Glibc 2.23
 - upstream the x86 Mes bootstrap to GuixSD
 - reduce the 1MB ASCII M1 seed to ~5000 LOC/~100KB of M2 source
 - revive Gash: a posix shell for Guile to reduce the bootstrap binary
   dependencies
 - and/or otherwise reduce the bootstrap binary dependencies

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] effort.

It currently consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter
prototype written in C and a Nyacc-based C compiler written in Scheme.
This C prototype is being simplified[3] to be transpiled by M2-Planet[4].

The Scheme interpreter prototype (mes.c) 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],
Guile's PEG[8] --and test suite just barely enough to support a simple
REPL and simple C-compiler: MesCC.

Mes+MesCC can compile an only lighty 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-4.1.0.

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 https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes

    wget https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes/-/archive/v0.16/mes-0.16.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

* Get informed, get involved

    Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.

* Changes in 0.16 since 0.15
 ** Core
 *** Support building with tcc, including Mes Lib C in-line assembly.
 *** core:execl now supports 1000 arguments.
 ** MesCC
 *** Mes Lib C now bootstraps glibc-2.2.5, binutils-2.20.1, gcc-4.1.0.
 *** MesCC binaries now run on Linux 4.17 too, i.e. survive Linus' new `sane mmap limits.'
 *** MesCC now runs with mescc-tools 0.5 (no = in long options).
 **** 3 new C test
 88-strrchrc, 97-fopen.c, 98-fopen.c.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** strrchr now stops when it reaches start of string.
 *** fopen now return 0 upon failure.  Supports binutils' hack: fd=-2 means `cached'.
 *** vfprintf, vsprintf now support precision and width on integers strings better.
 *** fread now produces ungetc'd chars too.
 *** memcmp now supports comparing 0 bytes, supporting binutils.

 *** The unused ELF header data section, identical to the text section, has been removed.

Greetings,
janneke

[0] https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix
[2] http://bootstrappable.org
[3] https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2
[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://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/master/guile.html/PEG-Parsing.html
[9] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[10] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
[11] https://github.com/oriansj/stage0