Send in your ideas. Deadline December 1, 2024
logo
hex
Grant
Theme fund: NGI Assure
Start: 2021-08
End: 2024-08

GNU Mes Tower

GNU Mes with alternative scheme implementations and WASM

GNU Mes was created to provide transparency and strong technical assurances when bootstrapping an operating system - instead of using large, unauditable binary blobs that bring the risk of "reproducibly malicious" behaviour within the software toolchain. GNU Mes provides a transparent alternative: starting from a Scheme implementation of a C compiler, and a minimal Scheme interpreter written in C, to bootstrap the full GNU toolchain capable of building the rest of all open-source software.

The GNU Mes Tower projects will add the option to stay on the "Scheme" path without having to resort to C, starting from either same minimal Scheme interpreter with a specializer as a Scheme compiler capable of generating native binaries. To achieve self-hosting, a series of bootstrapping steps will be implemented to add features to each interpretation level one-by-one, maintaining specialization to native code. The sequence of more and more capable Scheme compilers will allow operating systems like Guix to be bootstrapped without C, and move from a minimal Scheme interpreter to full-blown modern scheme dialects to allow much more advanced features and optimisations during the bootstrap.

  • The project's own website:

Run by Manyfold

Logo NLnet: abstract logo of four people seen from above Logo NGI Assure: letterlogo shaped like a tag

This project was funded through the NGI Assure Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 957073.