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 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 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 brings a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to GNU Guix. This bootstrap has halved the size of opaque, uninspectable binaries that were needed to bootstrap Guix 1.0. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds effort for any interested UNIX-like operating system.
Mes consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C, and a C compiler written in Scheme. This mes.c is being simplified to be transpiled by M2-Planet.
The Scheme interpreter 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 can compile an only 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-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 -- 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[*]:
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.sigIf 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 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273and 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.