Glad you liked it. We welcome submissions esp since we aren't strict now. We might prune some stuff in the future if it's not very good for bootstrapping. This one is a really neat project but has some pros and cons for our purposes.

Pro's. Small, cleanly written, safe, and runs through multiple compilers. The latter is especially useful if using David A. Wheeler's technique of diverse compilation.

Con's. It says no files or macros. We can probably tolerate no macros. What does no files mean? It can't support multiple files/modules, has no file I/O... what? Depending on meaning, it might be something easy to work around or not.

EDIT: I like that Ghuloum's paper was an inspiration for this as it's one of main links I push on the topic if one wants to use Scheme. There's a few repos in progress with I think at least one done on what's in that paper. I've sent messages to a few hoping they'll publish it in a readable form or write a tutorial. Time will tell... Also note I wrote my reply in response to the overview at the top. His related work section looks equally interesting but will take some time to go through.

EDIT 2: "This is what Darius Bacon did with "ichbins"." I'm guessing your that guy. Good job maybe being part of inspiration for this work. :)

Yes, that's me. :) Kragen didn't see Ichbins until later.

My favorite things about Ur-Scheme are that the code is clean, as you say, and he wrote up the lessons learned at some length. No files: I think he meant not yet implementing primitives like open-input-file. Macros you can get by without: I used to use an R4RS Scheme system of my own without them, except sometimes I'd call on a dumb defmacro expander as a preprocessor.

Kragen also wrote https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth which I haven't read as much of.

FWIW I also wrote this about a sort of self-hosting Python in Python: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/seven/dragon-taming-wit... -- as a bytecode compiler it's not too big but it depends on the giant Python runtime.

As it happens, tekknolagi and I have actually been trying to read StoneKnifeForth for a couple of weeks (though it's been slow going because I became a father in that time). That quickly got us into learning about ELF, because the binaries generated by StoneKnifeForth only seem to run as `sudo` for some reason. As a regular user they die with SIGKILL while being loaded.

The link to the ELF visualization (http://i.imgur.com/xMyblyM.png) at https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page is very useful. Thanks!

Hi Kartik! Yeah, my un-interest in ELF is part of why I haven't really read that code.