“Thirty years have passed since the MIX computer was designed [in 1969], and computer architecture has been converging during those years towards a rather different style of machine. Therefore it is time to replace MIX with a new computer that contains even less saturated fat than its predecessor.” — The successor MMIX was developed and published by Donald E. Knuth in 1999. The fully documented source code is available from the MMIX home and in the book MMIXware: A RISC Computer for the Third Millennium published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. (This book contains several chapters with additional information not available in the electronic distribution.)
The source code of MMIX is written in accordance with the rules of the Literate Programming philosophy, so you need to make sure that your computer supports the CWEB system. The CWEB sources are available for anonymous ftp from Stanford University. Bootstrapping CWEB on Unix systems is elementary and documented in the CWEB distribution; pre-compiled binary executables of the CWEB tools for Win32 systems are available from www.literateprogramming.com.
Details of this software can be found in the README file.
DEK has passed the baton of development to the group behind “MMIX home”. Besides several “official” releases from DEK in the form of gzipped tarballs, they provide their working sources through a Web-accessible Subversion (svn) repository.
The present project on Github is a separate effort and holds all releases by
DEK from 1999 to 2017 in the master branch, plus a few modifications from
“MMIX home” (although my master deviates from svn:mmixware/trunk in some
non-trivial ways, even in the tangled C codes). Much more interesting is the
local branch; it provides further improvements to the MMIX sources (some of
which are scheduled for inclusion in “MMIX home”) plus a “specfile” mmix.spec
for building installable packages for rpm and deb based Linux distributions
with the help of the rpmbuild and debbuild utilities respectively.
- Fix compiler warnings (
gcc -W -Wall -O) with a set of changefiles - Advanced build script
mmix.specfor rpm and deb packaging - Modified
Makefilefor target optimization - Use C99/C++ types
bool,uint8_tanduint32_t
Recently it has come to my attention that the local modifications are used
in the
Cygwin port of MMIXware.
And a parallel project seems to be a
faithful clone of the svn repository, recreating the full history of commits
by Knuth and Ruckert.