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Fitting a Forth in 512 bytes (2021)

Fitting a Forth in 512 bytes (2021)

3 comments

·October 26, 2024
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IAmLiterallyAB

I have a side project to try to make an extreme minimal size compiler for a Forth inspired language and implementation. It's a compiler that generates a Forth like interpreter and byte code. The bytecode is huffman encoded. Nothing works yet but its an idea.

Jun8

Forth has been sitting on my list of cool thing to learn when I have time for the past 20 yrs or so. What would be a compelling use case and setup?

mananaysiempre

One compelling use case is getting a REPL on any microcontroller with a UART and, say, ≥64K RAM (I remember lbForth[1] being particularly portable, and there are other implementations you could use as well).

I don’t know if you’d want to have that be your first experience with the Forth itself, though: there’s inherent fiddliness involved in bringing up hardware; the win is that Forth doesn’t really add any of its own once you’re vaguely familliar with the internals. If you can get it to boot and send and receive bytes, you can get an interactive Forth on it—or if the available resources don’t permit that, on an imaginary machine spanning it and your PC (a “tethered” Forth).

[1] https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/lbForth