What

This is a small language called Maru, written by Ian Piumarta (http://piumarta.com/software/maru/).

This repository is a clone of his work (the hg repo http://piumarta.com/hg/maru/ cloned at 2013-11-12) and an attempt to make it more approachable for the uninitiated.

Maru is a proof of concept of a rather small, yet fully bootstrapped language.

Why

Ian stopped working on this project and I wanted to keep it alive, and also wanted to understand it better myself.

Who

attila@lendvai.name

Status

I have isolated the C bootstrap code, clarified how it is built, and wrote another bootstrap interpreter in Common Lisp that is about 90% functional... but I ran out of steam when I got stuck at a bug, and stopped working on this project.

Chances are low that I will jump on it again, because the code is more of an experiment than something crystallized, and I couldn't get any feedback from anyone when I was lost. Decyphering it all is too much effort for an unclear amount of gain, so I put this on hold.

The branches:

• official holds Ian's work
• master holds a general cleanup of official
• lisp-bootstrap holds my work on a bootstrap interpreter based off of Common Lisp

How

There's a bootstrap eval written in C (and now in Common Lisp) for a Lisp like language (Maru). Let's call the executable it produces stage 1. Then there's a compiler written in Maru that can emit x86 asm code. To produce stage 2 this compiler is interpreted using stage 1 to compile a Maru eval written in Maru. The executable gained from the generated and compiled asm code is stage 2. Afterwards this executable is used to again generate the asm output (stage 3) and make sure that it's the same as when it was generated with the stage 1 (bootstrap) eval.