Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Not that impressive considering this uses BIOS routines heavily and whole operating systems including basic interpreter fit in a couple of KiB
    by jxnsneb
  • 512 bytes is quite a bit less than "a couple of kilobytes"
    by vrighter
  • 2020
    by gabrielsroka
  • Similar to this project: https://github.com/fuzzballcat/milliForth

    The ZEROEQUALS function can be replaced by: pop ax; neg ax;sbb ax,ax;push ax

    by jcmeyrignac
  • It's nice to see that has a brainfuck interpreter. I wrote a lisp compiler recently, then used that to write a lisp interpreter, and in both cases have a version of brainfuck in it.

    That said interpreting the brainfuck mandelbrot program takes several hours. On an old CP/M system I have a brainfuck compiler that converts a program to Z80 machine code, and that same mandelbrot example runs in less than two seconds.

    So speed isn't great, but having brainfuck really proves a toy system is "real".

    by stevekemp
  • Eight primitives and a colon compiler in 512 bytes is a nice demonstration of how much you can bootstrap from almost nothing. The examples building up from there are the best part.
    by Saltloaf
  • X86 asm as she is intended to be wrote. `repe cmpsb` for symbol table string comparison, etc.
    by addaon
  • Really shows how approachable it would have been to have just a tiny bit more added to the API of 'PC BIOS' to make for an extremely portable driver platform system to allow OS independent arbitrary hardware drivers as Forth that the system BIOS could compile at boot and run beneath the OS. Though of course the PC BIOS API from when that mattered isn't in anything like a modern protect mode operating profile.
    by mjevans
  • I love both Forth and Lisp but SectorLisp it's far better.

    Also, for a small demo, check Eforth under Subleq/Muxleq:

    https://github.com/howerj/subleq

    edit subleq.fth/muxleq.fth and set these options to 1:

       1 constant opt.multi      ( Add in large "pause" primitive )
   1 constant opt.editor     ( Add in Text Editor )
   1 constant opt.info       ( Add info printing function )
   0 constant opt.generate-c ( Generate C code )
   1 constant opt.better-see ( Replace 'see' with better version )
   1 constant opt.control    ( Add in more control structures )
   0 constant opt.allocate   ( Add in "allocate"/"free" )
   1 constant opt.float      ( Add in floating point code )
   0 constant opt.glossary   ( Add in "glossary" word )
   1 constant opt.optimize   ( Enable extra optimization )
   1 constant opt.divmod     ( Use "opDivMod" primitive )
   0 constant opt.self       ( self-interpreter [NOT WORKING] )
    Then run this to create a new EForth image with float/do...loop and such:

       ./muxleq ./muxleq.dec < muxleq.fth > new.dec
    Subleq is the original one, muxleq it's multiplexed. The command it's the same, just replace muxleq with subleq (edit the fth file too).

    Usage: ./muxleq new.dec

    For a brief help:

         words
    On Forth syntax, the EForth Overview PDF will be enough, except for 8086 related code, where here it's different.
    by anthk
  • Any opinion on which Forth implementation is good for 8-bit CPUs, in particular 8051?
    by actionfromafar