Short introduction to this project on Github.

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README.md

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+# MMIX 2009
+
+## A RISC Computer for the Third Millennium
+
+“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](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html) was developed and
+published by [Donald E. Knuth](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth) in
+**1999**. The fully documented source code is available from the
+[MMIX home](https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/src/index.html) and in the book
+[MMIXware: A RISC Computer for the Third
+Millennium](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmixware.html)
+published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. (This book contains several chapters with
+additional information not available in the electronic distribution.)
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+The source code of MMIX is written in accordance with the rules of the
+[Literate Programming](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html)
+philosophy, so you need to make sure that your computer supports the
+[CWEB](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html) system. The CWEB sources are
+available for anonymous ftp from [Stanford
+University](https://ftp.cs.stanford.edu/pub/cweb/cweb.tar.gz). 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](http://www.literateprogramming.com).
+
+## Getting Started
+
+Details of this software can be found in the [README](README) file.
+
+## Why have yet another project here?
+
+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 repository.
+
+The present project on Github is a separate effort and holds all releases by
+DEK from 1999 to 2023 in the `master` branch. Much more interesting is the
+`local` branch; it provides further improvements to the MMIX sources 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.
+
+### Major features added
+
+* Fix compiler warnings (`gcc -W -Wall -O`) with a set of changefiles
+* Advanced build script `mmix.spec` for rpm and deb packaging
+* Modified `Makefile` for target optimization
+* Use C99/C++ types `bool`, `uint8_t` and `uint32_t`
+* **New in 2023: Completely updated module structure with new header files**
+* **New in 2023: Purge `ARGS` macro in preparation for C2x**
+* **New in 2024: Build “shared object” `libmmix.so` (again)**
+
+## Postscript
+
+Recently it has come to my attention that the `local` modifications are used
+in the
+[Cygwin port of MMIXware](https://github.com/cygwinports-extras/mmixware).