mes/README

                                                              -*- org -*-

#+TITLE: About GNU Mes

Copyright © 2016, 2017,2018 Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

GNU Mes --- Maxwell Equations of Software

[[https://www.gnu.org/software/mes][GNU Mes]] aims to help create full
source bootstrapping for GNU/Linux distributions such as
[[https://www.gnu.org/software/guix][GuixSD]] as part of the
[[http://bootstrappable.org][bootstrappable builds]] effort.

It currently 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 [[https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2][being simplified]] to be transpiled by
[[https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet][M2-Planet]].

The Scheme interpreter prototype (mes.c) has a Garbage Collector, a
library of loadable Scheme modules-- notably Dominique Boucher's [[https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm][LALR]],
Pre-R6RS [[https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html][portable syntax-case]] with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's [[https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc][Nyacc]],
Guile's [[https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/master/guile.html/PEG-Parsing.html][PEG]] --and test suite just barely enough to support a simple
REPL and simple C-compiler: MesCC.

Mes+MesCC can compile an only [[http://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc][lightly patched TinyCC]] 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.

GNU Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: [[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%2525201.5%252520Programmers%252520Manual.pdf][LISP-1.5]] --
John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency
and Jeremiah Orians's [[https://github.com/oriansj/stage0][stage0]] ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler.

Mes is free software, it is distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public Licence version 3 or later.  See the file COPYING.

* Get it

   git clone [[git://git.savannah.gnu.org][git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.git]]

* Build it (see INSTALL for full instructions)

   ./configure
   make all
   make check

* REPL it

   src/mes.gcc        # default (64 bit) gcc-compiled
   src/mes.mlibc-gcc  # 32 bit, gcc -nostdlib
   src/mes            # 32 bit, bootstrapped, mes.M1+MesCC-compiled

* MesCC compiler

   scripts/mescc -c scaffold/main.c

* Bugs

    Please send Mes bug reports to guix-devel@gnu.org.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/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] http://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[10] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%25201.5%2520Programmers%2520Manual.pdf
[11] https://github.com/oriansj/stage0