Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

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I believe there has been a wide variety of successful Forth projects including NASA probes.

Forth makes more sense when you can be like Chuck and design your own hardware. At that point Forth is more of a minimalist stack-based philosophy that consists of the minimal hardware + software design to accomplish something.

Is his way better? It likely has somewhere near the bare possible code and is very efficient system wise. If you wanted a minimal solution and could devote years to the project, then this is nice.

Does it make the best usage of developer time? Obviously not in many cases. In today's business world, you just slap some components together, do minimal acceptable testing, push it out and go to the next thing. Cost is important to the customer, so as long as somebody is willing to do that kind of work, everyone has to. Of course the downside is that we've accreted all this tower of abstractions and complexity going from OS to JVM to libraries and source. We already have tons of COBOL that can barely be maintained. Next will be the large Java and Python codebases.

The Forth success stories tend to be really, really ancient, and therefore almost irrelevant. Much like Chuck's arguments for the merits of stack languages / machines. Processor pipelines have to be at least deep enough to do a wide multiplication or you're basically looking at a toy.

I actually have designed my own FPGA soft core barrel processor, it's a special blend of register and stack machine. The blend occurs by placing stacks under the registers themselves. I believe this allows a low register count, 2 operand architecture to be more efficient than it otherwise would be, which minimizes opcode size, and sidesteps most the crazy you get when trying to shoehorn most processes into a single stack environment.

But has clear downsides as well, the main one being the stacks can become easily corrupted by any process using them - this is true of any stack machine but you strangely never hear it come up in conversations with Forth types. Stack processors can eliminate much traditional processor state, but the stacks themselves contain state, which is often overlooked.

Have you seen his Green Arrays? Not sure what the best use case is, but primitive it ain't.

Multi-core F18A technology, each of which is a simple 18 bit processor. IMO, anything less than 32 bits (with internal 33 x 33 = 65 bit multiply) falls into the primitive category abyss.

Moore is an incredible salesman, I'll give him that.

Moore is an awful salesman but a skilled technologist, you have it reversed. He only recently got buyers for his recent processors, and he doesn't handle sales in any of his business endeavors.

Also, the chips he made before GA were 32-bit. He deemed it unnecessary, and the GA chips run miles around them.

I meant that he's a genius at the whole stack machine / language shaman thing.

32 bits are unnecessary?!? I suppose a 18 bit machine would run a lot "faster" than a 32 bit machine given certain data sets and loads, but I wouldn't want to do any audio DSP with it.

Actually, audio DSP might be a bit better on them, too. They have the best power/instruction ratio on the entire planet, and given each chip has 144 entire computers on it, audio DSP should be no problem for them.

"...and given each chip has 144 entire computers on it..."

Entire computers? What decade is it again?

Not just a processor, but peripherals as well.

This!

A core and a computer aren't the same, and while Intel processors have multiple cores, sometimes many, they don't have multiple computers within.

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100...

COMPLETE SYSTEMS: We refer to our chips as Multi-Computer Systems because they are, in fact, complete systems. Supply one of our chips with power and a reset signal, and it is up and running. All of our chips can load their software at high speed using a single wire that can be daisy chained for multiple chips; if desired, most can be bootstrapped by a simple SPI flash memory. Application software can be manufactured into a custom chip for a modest cost to further simplify overall system design. External memory is not required to run application software, but our larger chips have sufficient I/O to directly control external memory devices if desired.

Contrast this with a Multi-Core CPU, which is not a computing system until other devices such as crystals, memory controllers, memories, and bus controllers have been added. All of these things consume energy, occupy space, cost money, add complexity, and create bottlenecks. Most multi-core CPUs are designed to speed up conventional operating systems, which typically have hundreds or thousands of concurrent processes, by letting a handful of process execute in parallel as opposed to only one. They are not, typically, designed for significantly parallel processing, and they are even less well suited for simple applications than are their less expensive single-core progenitors.

It's meant for hyper-parallel applications, unlike Pentium cores.

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