Annotation of papers/freem_history/freem_history.ms, revision 1.13
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1.2 snw 3: \" History of FreeM
4: \"
5: \" Copyright (C) 2025 Serena Willis
6: \"
1.3 snw 7: \" $Log: freem_history.ms,v $
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36: \" Initial draft of FreeM History paper
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42: .R1
43: database ../references.bib
44: move-punctuation
45: .R2
1.1 snw 46: .TL
47: The History of FreeM
48: .AU
49: Serena Willis
50: .AI
51: Coherent Logic Development
52: .AB
1.10 snw 53: Since 2014, the author has been the maintainer of the primary fork of the FreeM implementation of the M programming language and persistent global storage engine. In this paper, we will share some of the history of FreeM, as well as its current status and goals.
1.1 snw 54: .AE
55: .SH
56: Initial Involvement
57: .PP
1.12 snw 58: The author's mentor in computer programming and UNIX was Lawrence Landis, who involved himself heavily in the M programming language ca. 1991. Mr. Landis promoted the M language to the author from 1991 forward, and first demonstrated FreeM to her in August 1998. In 2010, the author incorporated her company, Coherent Logic Development, learned M, and began doing contract work in M through Mr. Landis's company, Fourth Watch Software.
1.1 snw 59: .PP
1.3 snw 60: Mr. Landis was the owner of FreeM's SourceForge repository
61: .[
62: gumpSF
63: .]
64: , which had not been touched in a number of years, following Fidelity National Information Services' decision to release GT.M under a free software license. In August 2011, the author downloaded the source code for FreeM and did enough work on it to enable building and running under modern GNU/Linux systems and posted it to the mumpster.org forums.
65: .[
66: freem014
67: .]
1.1 snw 68: .PP
69: In 2014, Mr. Landis gave the author administrator access to the FreeM SourceForge repository and transferred maintainership of the project to her.
1.3 snw 70: .[
71: gumpSF
72: .]
1.1 snw 73: .SH
74: Early History
75: .PP
1.3 snw 76: FreeM was developed in Germany in the mid-1990s by a developer who went by the pseudonym \fIShalom ha-Ashkenaz\fR, whose actual identity remains unknown,
77: .[
1.9 snw 78: walters99
79: %P 19
1.3 snw 80: .]
1.11 snw 81: though it is thought by some that they are a dentist who learned C and developed FreeM on their own time. Shalom developed FreeM at a time when InterSystems Corporation (the company that developed the ISM implementation of M) was acquiring the majority of its competitors and shutting them down.
1.3 snw 82: .[
1.9 snw 83: ibid
84: %P 18
1.3 snw 85: .]
1.13 ! snw 86: Shalom wished to provide a community-driven, open-source implementation of M as a bulwark against the growing threat of single-vendor hegemony over the M language. Its design\(emas well as some of the documentation included with the original sources\(emindicate that FreeM was originally targeted to the MS-DOS family of operating systems. It made use of a very limited subset of the C library, and included instructions for renaming the MS-DOS style 8.3 filenames in order to compile under UNIX.
1.3 snw 87: .[
88: freemREADME
89: .]
1.5 snw 90: .KS
1.3 snw 91: .PP
92: At one point in FreeM's early history, Shalom ported FreeM from MS-DOS to SCO UNIX, the UNIX System V Release III-derived descendant of Microsoft XENIX, now known as SCO OpenServer\(ema platform still supported by FreeM today.
93: .[
94: portSCO
95: .]
96: This port brought support for the \fIscoansi\fR terminal type, including colors and ANSI X3.64 control mnemonics.
1.5 snw 97: .KE
1.1 snw 98: .SH
1.11 snw 99: Generic Universal M Project
1.1 snw 100: .PP
1.5 snw 101: The \fIGeneric Universal M Project\fR was conceived by Richard F. Walters, a professor from U.C. Davis. The GUMP, following the rising popularity of object-oriented programming in the 1990s, was intended to be a toolkit allowing M implementations to be built from discrete components with a well-defined and well-specified public interface among these components. These components included the global handler (supplying the functionality of persistent global storage), and the interpreter/compiler (responsible for implementing M language commands). The components would have been able to communicate over a network, or in-process on the same host, enabling distributed computing functionality.
1.3 snw 102: .[
103: c2m
104: .]
105: .PP
106: Although the specification for the GUM interface to global handlers attained a reasonably well-specified level of completeness,
107: .[
108: gumapi
109: .]
1.9 snw 110: and Lawrence Landis and others developed a mostly-complete implementation of a GUM global handler,
1.3 snw 111: .[
112: gumpsrc
113: .]
114: none of the other envisioned components were ever completed, and specifically, the interpreter component was missing.
1.1 snw 115: .SH
116: Shalom's Gift
117: .PP
1.5 snw 118: In July of 1998, Shalom ha-Ashkenaz donated the FreeM source code (then known as FreeMUMPS) to the M User's Group-Deutschland (MUG-D), hoping the community would take the nascent implementation from its infancy through to a state of production-ready completeness and robustness. Shalom also placed a few conditions on his gift: a public release could not be made until a substantial set of milestones were reached. Per his conditions, the FreeMUMPS project must:
1.3 snw 119: .[
120: freemREADME
121: .]
1.1 snw 122: .IP \(bu 2
123: Implement the entirety of \fIANSI X11.1-1995\fR
124: .IP \(bu 2
125: Use Structured System Variables instead of \fIVIEW\fR commands and \fI$VIEW\fR functions
126: .IP \(bu 2
127: Raise the string size limits
128: .IP \(bu 2
129: Implement MWAPI, OMI, X11 bindings, and GKS bindings
130: .IP \(bu 2
131: Be substantially free of major bugs
132: .PP
133: Although MUG-D readily accepted the contribution of FreeMUMPS, the organization itself lacked the manpower and expertise to complete the implementation. Just as it is now, the intersection of M community members who know enough of the M language and C language to work on a project this ambitious was quite small.
1.11 snw 134: .SH
1.7 snw 135: .KS
1.1 snw 136: Merging GUMP and FreeM
137: .PP
1.5 snw 138: Very shortly after the contribution of FreeMUMPS to MUG-D, Richard F. Walters and a small team of developers and administrative staff who had been working on the GUMP assumed maintainership of the FreeMUMPS source code, with Lawrence Landis managing the development efforts.
1.3 snw 139: .[
1.9 snw 140: shortWalters99
141: %P 19
1.3 snw 142: .]
143: This included representatives from the \fIM Technology Association\fR (an M vendor association having several foreign branches), the \fIM Development Committee\fR (the M standards organization hosting the ANSI/ISO standards for the M language, then sponsored by the M Technology Association), and others.
144: .[
145: freemContributors
146: .]
147: The goals of this team were to:
1.1 snw 148: .IP \(bu 2
149: Meet Shalom's requirements for a public release of FreeMUMPS
150: .IP \(bu 2
151: Convert FreeMUMPS into the first interpreter component of the GUMP
1.11 snw 152: .KE
1.1 snw 153: .PP
1.5 snw 154: During this period, Ronald L. Fox of Diagnostic Laboratory Services in Honolulu, HI (who passed in 2010)
1.3 snw 155: .[
156: ronFoxGrave
157: .]
158: ported FreeMUMPS from SCO UNIX to Red Hat 5 and glibc-6.
159: .[
160: ronFoxPort
161: .]
162: Steve "Saintly" Zeck of the U.C. Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital
163: .[
164: saintlyBio
165: .]
166: also attempted to rewrite the symbol table code to lift string size limits,
167: .[
168: saintlySymtab
169: .]
1.8 snw 170: David Whitten enhanced some of the implementation-specific extensions, and Lawrence Landis integrated Zeck's symbol table work.
1.3 snw 171: .PP
1.5 snw 172: In FreeM 0.1.0, the name of the implementation was changed from FreeMUMPS to Public Standard M, and again to Free Standard MUMPS and then FreeM when it was discovered leading up to the FreeM 0.2.0 release that the PSM acronym was already in use for Patterson & Gray's
1.3 snw 173: .[
174: mdc_implementations
175: .]
176: M implementation.
177: .[
178: Changes.GUM
179: .]
180: Dr. Walters also received the implementation ID of 49 from then secretary of the M Development Committee, Don Piccone.
181: .[
1.9 snw 182: ibid
1.3 snw 183: .]
1.1 snw 184: .PP
1.5 snw 185: One of the contributors to FreeM at this stage\(emprimarily in the area of M vendor routines\(emwas Axel Trocha, who would later maintain a private fork of FreeM.
1.3 snw 186: .[
187: trochaFork
188: .]
1.7 snw 189: .KS
1.1 snw 190: .SH
191: The GT.M Free Software Release
192: .PP
193: GT.M, an acronym for \fIGreystone Technology MUMPS\fR, is an M implementation that was released by Greystone Technology in 1986. Greystone was later acquired by Sanchez Computer Associates, which was in turn acquired by Fidelity National Information Services.
1.3 snw 194: .[
195: fisSanchezAcquisition
196: .]
197: .PP
198: When GT.M was released under the GNU General Public License in 2000,
199: .[
200: gtmRelease
201: .]
1.5 snw 202: it seemed to many to negate the entire \fIraison d'etre\fR for FreeM, as GT.M was a well-established, robust, and high-performance M implementation with which FreeM could not then compete. Unfortunately, at this time, the GUMP and FreeM projects lost all of their momentum, and new development along these lines rapidly ceased. The final GUMP team release of FreeM was 0.5.0.
1.3 snw 203: .[
204: freem050
205: .]
206: However, Axel Trocha's private port would continue to be developed for some years.
1.7 snw 207: .KE
1.1 snw 208: .SH
209: Axel Trocha's Fork
210: .PP
1.11 snw 211: When the free software release of GT.M stalled the GUMP team's progress on the primary branch of development, Axel Trocha, an aforementioned contributor, continued development on the FreeM source code. Trocha added many interesting features to the FreeM codebase, including:
1.1 snw 212: .IP \(bu 2
213: A native port to Microsoft Windows
214: .IP \(bu 2
215: Compiling FreeM as an Apache web server module, allowing FreeM to be used easily for web development
216: .IP \(bu 2
217: The ability to output HTML code in a heredoc-style format, with any line of code beginning with a left angle bracket being interpreted as HTML with support for interpolated M locals and globals
218: .IP \(bu 2
219: Extensions allowing FreeM to be used as a command-line shell, along the lines of UNIX \fIbash\fR, Windows \fIcmd.exe\fR, etc.
220: .PP
1.5 snw 221: Trocha also maintains ownership of the \fIfreem.net\fR Internet domain,
1.3 snw 222: .[
223: trochaDomain
224: .]
1.5 snw 225: and continued issuing public releases of his FreeM port on that site until sometime after 2004, at which point this fork was made entirely private. Currently, freem.net is a blank page. However, trocha's fork of FreeM continues to the present as the back-end storage engine and programming environment for the www.elvenrunes.de website.
1.3 snw 226: .[
227: elvenRunes
228: .]
1.5 snw 229: The author has communicated with Mr. Trocha on occasion, and though he is supportive of the author's efforts, has chosen to remain in the background.
1.1 snw 230: .SH
231: Resuming Primary Development Branch
232: .PP
233: In 2011, the author downloaded the FreeM source code from the GUM Project's SourceForge repository\(emdormant since 2000\(emand updated it just enough that it would compile and run on modern GNU/Linux systems. The author also quickly updated FreeM to support terminal sizes larger than 80x24.
234: .SH
235: Taking Maintainership
236: .PP
1.5 snw 237: In 2014, Lawrence Landis transferred administrative access of the GUMP repository, conferring maintainership of the primary branch of FreeM development to the author. Since then, many features have been added and many bugs corrected, including:
1.3 snw 238: .IP \(bu 2
239: Adding support for proper namespaces, configured through a \fIfreem.conf\fR file, which standardizes routine and global storage locations
240: .IP \(bu 2
241: Adding support for Structured System Variables
242: .IP \(bu 2
243: Adding support for the asynchronous event specification from MDC Type A proposal \fIX11/1998-28\fR
244: .[
245: x119828
246: .]
247: .IP \(bu 2
248: Adding support for constants via the \fICONST\fR keyword
249: .IP \(bu 2
250: Adding a \fIWITH\fR command allowing the specification of an implicit prefix to all subsequent variable references
251: .IP \(bu 2
252: Adding a runtime \fIWATCH\fR command, tracking changes to specified local or global variables
253: .IP \(bu 2
254: Adding an \fIASSERT\fR command, which will fail with an error message if the following expression evaluates \fIfalse\fR
255: .IP \(bu 2
256: Removing the Steve Zeck symbol table implementation\(emwhich was unreliable\(emand reverting to the original implementation
257: .IP \(bu 2
258: Adding support for the GNU \fIreadline\fR library, with persistent command line history and editing
259: .IP \(bu 2
260: Adding REPL-like functionality (in direct mode, any M expression beginning with a number will be prepended with an implicit \fIWRITE\fR)
261: .IP \(bu 2
262: Adding transaction processing
263: .IP \(bu 2
264: Adding \fIKVALUE\fR and \fIKSUBSCRIPTS\fR
265: .IP \(bu 2
266: Preparing to support the \fIM Windowing API\fR (MWAPI)
267: .IP \(bu 2
268: Adding the \fIfmadm\fR command-line utility, for system administration functions
269: .IP \(bu 2
270: Adding support for after-image journaling and forward recovery of globals
1.5 snw 271: .KS
1.3 snw 272: .IP \(bu 2
273: Writing a \fItexinfo\fR manual, from which the HTML manual is derived
274: .IP \(bu 2
275: Porting to Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/x86, Linux/s390x, Linux/armv6l, Linux/armv7l, SCO OpenServer 5.0.7, Tru64 UNIX/alpha, AIX/ppc, Mac OS X/x86, GNU HURD, Cygwin, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and WSL1/2
1.11 snw 276:
1.5 snw 277: In addition, the FreeM web site
1.3 snw 278: .[
279: freemWebsite
280: .]
281: was created, to distribute downloads and documentation.
1.5 snw 282: .KE
1.3 snw 283: .SH
284: Future
285: .PP
1.5 snw 286: FreeM is envisioned as a client-oriented desktop M implementation, for developing graphical user interfaces that will run on mobile and desktop devices.
1.3 snw 287: .PP
288: The author also intends to adopt the original vision of the GUMP team, dividing FreeM's functionality into discrete components having a well-specified public interface, with the ability to run in distributed computing environments over a network.
289: .PP
290: FreeM's mission is to advance the state-of-the-art in M implementations, and push the evolution of the language forward. Maintaining portability to as many vintage and modern UNIX systems as possible is held as a high priority, while portability of M routines and MDC standards compliance will be maintained through the use of the new \fI$ZDIALECT\fR intrinsic special variable to ensure that such compliance does not conflict with the primary goal of elegantly advancing the state-of-the-art and finding new audiences for the concepts originated by Neil Pappalardo and Octo Barnett in 1966.
291: .PP
292: The FreeM project is also strongly committed to free software principles, and is firmly aligned with the goals of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, believing that the ethical concerns surrounding proprietary software are at least as important as the practical concerns espoused by the Open Source movement.
293: .[
294: whyFreeSoftware
295: .]
1.5 snw 296: .SH
297: Conclusion
298: .PP
1.7 snw 299: FreeM has seen a colorful and turbulent history, touched by many capable hands. Though public development of any strain of the implementation was dormant for nearly a decade, fourteen years of almost continuous development have passed since the project resumed in 2011, and a decade since official maintainership passed in 2014, and great progress has been made.
300: .PP
301: FreeM\(emas is the case for all M projects\(empresses forward in a period where the future of the M programming language is uncertain. M Development Committee efforts concurrent with FreeM development have been sporadic and have missed many milestones, the community's most prominent members are aging, and many organizations have migrated from large M applications to what is perceived as more "modern" replacements.
302: .PP
303: It is the opinion of the author that the tight integration of an expressive and dynamic language with a robust and performant persistent storage engine makes M a natural candidate for many new and general applications. Modern application development is plagued by overwhelming bars to entry, requiring mastery of many languages and database management systems and the bulky interfaces connecting them.
304: .PP
1.11 snw 305: Though not without significant warts accreted over the years, M has no such overhead. Thus, FreeM seeks to press its philosophical advantages by mitigating the language's accumulated cruft, and adding clean interfaces addressing the needs of today. With these goals in mind, development proceeds apace.
1.7 snw 306: .KS
1.5 snw 307: .SH
308: Copyright and License
309: .LP
1.6 snw 310: This document is Copyright \[co] 2025 Serena Willis
1.5 snw 311: .LP
312: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
313: .[
314: gfdl
315: .]
316: Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
317: .LP
1.13 ! snw 318: \fI$Id: freem_history.ms,v 1.12 2025/04/23 18:59:53 snw Exp $\fR
1.7 snw 319: .KE
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