Subject: Mes 0.13 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Mes 0.13, representing 45
commits over 3 weeks.  MesCC can now compile a functional tcc when
running on Mes (in ~1h45') or on Guile (in ~3min).

This means that we are getting very close to a full source bootstrap
of tcc: it is now built without gcc, glibc or guile; using only
MesCC-tools and Mes sources and corresponding ascii/binary seeds.

* About

    Mes[0] aims to help create full source bootstrapping for GuixSD[1]
    as part of the bootstrappable builds[2] project.

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

    The Scheme interpreter prototype (mes.c) has a Garbage Collector,
    a library of loadable Scheme modules-- notably Dominique Boucher's
    LALR[4], pre-R6RS portable syntax-case[5] with R7RS ellipsis, Matt
    Wette's Nyacc[6], Guile's PEG[7] --and test suite just barely
    enough to support a simple REPL (repl.mes) and simple C-compiler
    MesCC.

    Mes+MesCC can compile a modified TinyCC[8] that is close to being
    self-hosting.  A GNU Ccc-compiled tcc is known[9] to compile GCC.

    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] ~300 byte self-hosting
    hex assembler.

* Download

    git clone https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes

    wget https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes/-/archive/v0.13/mes-0.13.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

* Changes in 0.13 since 0.12
 ** Core
 *** Bootstrapped Mes+MesCC can now compile a patched tcc in ~2h30' (~25,000 LOC).
 *** MesCC scripts for Mes and Guile are now merged; executable is: `mescc'.
 *** Mes now uses only one arena for stop-and-copy; doubles available size.
 *** Mes now has a Guile-like command-line interface (mes.repl has been removed).
 *** Mes now boots into a full Scheme by default.
 *** Mes can now be compiled (MES_MINI=1) to boot into a minimal Scheme (~2000 cells).
 *** Mes now creates less garbage in the reader and in
 append2, append_reverse, reverse, reverse!, vector-for-each, vector-to-list, vector-map.
 *** 5 new functions
 append-reverse, chmod, ioctl, isatty, isspace, last_pair, reverse!.
 ** Language
 *** 3 new functions
 char-whitespace?, chmod, isatty?
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** Two bugs in the jam scraper/garbage collector have been fixed.
 *** equal2_p now uses tail call elimination.
 *** Escaped characters in strings are now read and write'd correctly.
 *** The repl now expands macros again.

Greetings,
janneke

[0] https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix
[2] http://bootstrappable.org
[3] https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet
[4] https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm
[5] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html
[6] https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc/
[7] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/master/guile.html/PEG-Parsing.html
[8] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[9] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2017-05/msg00103.html
[10] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
[11] https://github.com/oriansj/stage0