GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the GNU System. It has helped to decimate the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0. Recently, version 0.24.2 has realized the first Full Source Bootstrap for Guix. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds effort for any UNIX-like operating system.
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 bootstrappable-tcc and the Mes C library we can build an ancient version of the GNU tools 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 was inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5 – John McCarthy page 13, Guix’s source/binary packaging transparency and Jeremiah Orians’s stage0, a ~500-byte self-hosting hex assembler.
We are very grateful to NLNet for sponsoring the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap, the ARM port, and the Full Source Bootstrap.
GNU Mes is free software, it is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 or later. See the file COPYING.
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.gitBuild it (see INSTALL for full instructions)
./configure
make all
make check./pre-inst-env mes./pre-inst-env mescc -c scaffold/main.cPlease send Mes bug reports to bug-mes@gnu.org.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix [2] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/ [3] https://bootstrappable.org [4] https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet [5] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mescc-tools [6] https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm [7] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html [8] https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc [9] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc [10] https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf [11] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0 [12] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes [13] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-arm [14] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-ARM_RISC-V
Copyright © 2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021,2022,2023 Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
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