mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.21

Subject: GNU Mes 0.21 released

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We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.21, representing
54 commits over 10 weeks.

Mes has now brought the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to Guix (bootstrap
a GNU/Linux system without binary GNU toolchain or equivalent).  See
https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/

This release supports a Scheme-only bootstrap: Mes can now be built with
Gash and the experimental Gash Core Utils instead of using GNU Awk, GNU
Bash, the GNU Core Utilities, GNU Grep, GNU Gzip, GNU Make, GNU SED, and
GNU Tar.  Also, the Mes C Library now supports bootstrapping those.
Finally, this release brings Mes as a package to Debian GNU/Linux.

We are excited that the Nlnet Foundation[12] is now sponsoring this
work!

Next targets:

 - Introduce the Reduced Binaries Seed bootstrap to NixOS (Debian,
   Gentoo, ...?)
 - Scheme-only bootstrap: use Guile, Gash and Gash Core Utils to remove
   awk, bash, core utilities, grep, gzip, make, sed, tar, etc. from the
   Guix bootstrap binaries
 - ARM support
 - Full Source Bootstrap: compile Mes.c using M2-Planet
 - Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for ARM
 - the Hurd

Packages are available in Guix master.

* About

  GNU Mes[0] brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap[1] to GNU Guix[2].
  This bootstrap has halved the size of opaque, uninspectable binaries
  that were needed to bootstrap Guix.  The final goal is to help create
  a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds[3] effort
  for any interested UNIX-like operating system.

  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 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 enough to support a REPL and a C99 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-0.21.tar.gz
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.21.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.21.tar.gz
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.21.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  dea43529d2d84fb4b9d81bdd9efcc715  mes-0.21.tar.gz
  35721a81feeab6e0d5913b8bf78f18951edbb964  mes-0.21.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-0.21.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 0.21 since 0.20
 ** Core
 *** Mes can now be bootstrapped with Gash and Gash Core Utils.
 *** Mes now supports a Scheme-only bootstrap.
 *** Mes now supports -c EXPR.
 ** MesCC
 *** Mes C Library now supports bootstrapping GNU Awk, GNU Bash, GNU SED, and GNU Tar.
 *** Mes C Library now has limited float support in vfprintf, vsnprintf, vsscanf.
 **** 7 new functions
 abtod, atof, creat, dtoab, execlp, isgraph, mknod, readlink, strtod,
 symlink.
 **** 5 new stubs
 getgrgid, getgrnam, getpgid, getpgrp, mktime, setgrent.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** A bug with `mes -c EXPR' has been fixed.
 *** The REPL now works again on x86_64.
 *** --with-system-libc now works again.

Greetings,
janneke and Danny.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes
[1] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/
[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