GNU Mes 0.24.1 released

October 16, 2022

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.24.1, representing 23 commits over five months by four people.

Mes now supports the stage0-posix and M2-Planet Full Source bootstrap on Aarch64 for ARM. Because stage0-posix does not support ARM yet, the Mes ARM bootstrap is currently prototyped on Aarch64.

We are excited that the NlNet Foundation[4] is again sponsoring this work!

What's next?

Work to prototype this so-called "Full Source Bootstrap" for ARM on Aarch64 is happening on the wip-aarch64-bootstrap[3] branch. Also, full Guile compatible module support, and RISC-V support.

Enjoy!

About

GNU Mes 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 of GNU Guix. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds 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. Mes can now be bootstrapped from M2-Planet and Mescc-Tools.

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

Mes + MesCC + Mes C Library can build a bootstrappable 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-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 -- John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and Jeremiah Orians's stage0 ~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[*]:
mes-0.24.1.tar.gz
mes-0.24.1.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
mes-0.24.1.tar.gz
mes-0.24.1.tar.gz.sig

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

bceaaaf1cafaa31ccb1ee1247ce2dd651a2f67be  mes-0.24.1.tar.gz  
35120ceb0676632e58973355b9f86dff9cc717ed65ed2a17ff5272c59f2a0535  mes-0.24.1.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-0.24.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, or that public key has expired, try the following commands to update or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

gpg --recv-keys 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273

Get informed, get involved

See bootstrappable.org
Join #bootstrappable on irc.libera.chat

NEWS

Changes in 0.24.1 since 0.24