Miasma: an x86 machine code toolkit
	http://accesscom.com/~darius/software/miasma/
	Version 0.3

	By Darius Bacon <darius@accesscom.com>
	and Brian Spilsbury <brian@designix.com.au>.
	Distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License; 
	see the accompanying COPYING file for details.


QUICK START

To run, enter (load "loadme.scm") after editing that file to use the
portability-foo.scm appropriate to your Scheme system.  Then enter
(generate-c-assembler "c/asm.h") to generate an asm.h file.  c/calc.c
is a trivial sample jit compiler using it.  That's all there is that's
usable in this version (and not very, at that).  See Miasma 0.1 for a
version that has seen some actual use.

Similarly, you can regenerate the Python code emitter with
(generate-py-assembler "python/x86.py").  To use it, cd into the
python subdirectory, run `make', then `python test.py' or `python
calc.py "2 3 +"'.  test.py builds and calls a trivial function that
adds 42 to its argument.  calc.py compiles an RPN expression, then
calls the compiled code.


ABOUT

Miasma is a Scheme program that generates x86 machine code generators.
Its intended uses include compiler backends and runtime code
generation, and perhaps in the future other machine-code toolkit
functions like disassembly.

Version 0.1 was torn bodily out of Vapour
(http://vapour.sourceforge.net).  0.2 was redesigned to make it easier
to generate code for different purposes from the instruction tables,
e.g. backends in different languages -- though so far all I've done is
a C backend.  Scheme and Common Lisp backends should be easy to put
back in but I haven't had a need for one yet.  0.3 adds a Python
backend.


DOCUMENTATION

This version is undocumented.  These docs were for 0.1 but should
still shed some light:

	old/doc/Usage.text	The assembler syntax
	old/doc/Overview.text	How the implementation works


LICENSE

Miasma x86 machine code toolkit
Copyright (C) 2000,2002  Darius Bacon and Brian Spilsbury

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307  USA