I wrote a Forth implementation for x86 (2012) | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a Forth implementation for x86 (2012)

davazp.net

95 pointssea6ear11 comments

Man, the title plays it down a lot. I thought it was just an interpreter and nearly skipped over it instead of a Forth-machine OS, which is much neater.

Here the author. I loved working on this project, it was very satisfying building everything from scratch.

However, it would have been even better if somebody else would have joint.

I have a joint for you buddy. :)

Looks impressive! Are you planning to add support for networking?

I stopped working on the project like 4 years ago. I don't have plans to add anything else soon.

It would be nice though, and networking in particular is one of the more interesting things to implement I think. Maybe some day.

I'm loving the recent rise of posts about FORTH. It's always been a pleasure to play with, right the way back from the 80s.

Like implementing a Lisp, every programmer who likes programming languages should implement at least a Forth. However, this goes a bit further and is lovely.

The enthusiasm with which this was written almost matches the enthusiasm the author had about the project.

Is anyone able to run this on Mac/Darwin? I think it might need gcc:

  $ cc -fstrength-reduce -nostdinc -m32 -nostdlib -fno-builtin \
     -nostartfiles -nodefaultlibs -I. -ggdb -I.   -c -o boot.o boot.S
  clang: warning: optimization flag '-fstrength-reduce' is not supported
  clang: warning: argument unused during compilation: '-nostartfiles'
  boot.S:21:23: error: unexpected token in '.section' directive

You will need a gcc that can make ELF files since that is what qemu -kernel expects. I don't think homebrew has a gcc that can do this.

(2012)

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