Re: Can Guile be bootstrapped from source without psyntax-pp.scm?

[Michael Schierl]

Hello,


Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote to guile-user@gnu.org[1] on 07 Jul 2017:
> Mark H Weaver writes:
>
> > > Does this mean Guile is not bootstrappable from source only?
> >
> > That's correct.  psyntax-pp.scm is not source code, and it is needed to
> > bootstrap Guile.
>
> I'm facing the same problem with Mes.  I have an implemenation of
> syntax-rules that is just about 200 lines of define-macro source code,
> but not syntax case.

> > Having said this, I agree that it would be better if psyntax.scm were
> > written in such a way that it could be bootstrapped without the use of
> > itself.  Maybe some day we'll rewrite it to make it so.
>
> That could be essential to our full source bootstrapping efforts so I'm
> very much interested!


For the record, I have written a psyntax implementation that can be used
by Guile (3.0.2) and does not require an expanded version of itself. It
is not ideal (not fully hygienic and does not support with-ellipsis),
but it works well enough to bootstrap a slightly patched version of
psyntax.scm, which then can be used to bootstrap "the real thing" and
then regenerate psyntax-pp.scm (resulting in a bit-for-bit identical
version if you run the bootstrap on 64-bit Linux).

The project is at
<https://github.com/schierlm/guile-psyntax-bootstrapping/>.

It may still contain some unnecessary code, and the patch for the
patched vesion is definitely not minimal, but for now I'm glad that it
works.

I may improve it later. Contributions are welcome as well.


Regards,


Michael


[1]: https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2017-07/msg00011.html