Next #forth project: Super barebones (but useful) #willow protocol implementation.
Following with the post-apocalyptic aesthetic and everything around things like #permacomputing and #collapseos I see an opportunity for a decentralized easy to use way to share data between isolated communities through something like the #willow protocol.
I don't know why I'm so attracted to this aesthetic but it's a bit of a current obsession.
Very excited about this book! Conway’s Game of Life is what got me out of blubberism almost three decades ago as I implemented it in php and started looking into more succinct implementations which brought me to #apl, #lisp and so #forth.
I am building a many core #Forth computer on FPGAs using open source tools. It will run on boards with an FPGA, two USB ports, an RP2040 to drive the HDMI port, Flash and Hyperram.
http://collapseos.org/ is pretty cool, I need to get better at #Forth. This space of simple, low requirements computing is super interesting to me, do you know any more resources? Also some that are hardware based?
I think I’ll spend this afternoon working on FORTH and playing with PICO-8 a bit. I’d really like to have Picotron on a Raspberry Pi, however. Hm. Maybe I should write an OS…
I used to own a stack of boxes of vintage Byte magazine issues from 78-82 as I wanted physical copies of the #smalltalk and #lisp articles (which at the time were not scanned/available). Anyway I couldn’t help but read almost all of them, mainly for the ads! Also some great #forth articles. Ultimately it was incredibly informative to learn about the hype cycle of tech. So every time I hear about crypto or LLM shit I imagine it (well what ever the aphantasia version of imagining is) in terms of half page glossy over produced vintage byte magazine ads.
I am happy to announce the 1.1.0 release of Mecrisp-Quintus, an optimising #Forth compiler capable of generating native code with constant folding and register allocation which is now also available for 64 bit #riscv RV64IM and RV64IMC targets in addition to RV32I(M)(C) and MIPS M4K.
A followup. There are implementations of FORTH on RaspberryPi, including a “bare metal” one. I dont want to tie up one of my Pis, so I may opt for the more standard one, gForth.
Now this is #retrocomputing: someone has ported 40 year old #RTS from some uncertain #Forth dialect from the #AppleII to gForth. It originated a Byte Magazine article.
The game is playable on #Linux in a terminal at 40 columns. Someone else modernized the game to be 80 column native and make a handful of other quality of life improvements.
Today FORTH may seem like an obscure programming language, but almost every computer magazine I have from 1983/5 has articles and adverts for #FORTH products. So I would class it the most mainstream niche language.
Philip has created a new release of VolksForth 6502 for the Commodore 64 and Commander X16
This release adapts the X16 VolksForth to the R46 ROM. It also adds an X16 binary with added words to invoke the ROM-based X16Edit (XED), to list directories and files (DIR and CAT) and to issue DOS commands and read the error channel (DOS).
I know exactly what the problem is with eForth: I’m testing manually by poring over emulator execution traces; I’m not writing tests. I know the inner interpreter and some code words work, so I guess I’ll have to write a test framework out of that, and then test the effects of every other word until I’ve worked it all out. #TDD#FORTH