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Comment by Munksgaard | Hacker News Reader

This is great! Forth is such an interesting language.

Does anyone know of uses in industry?

Not sure if it counts as "industry" but FORTH-based Open Firmware is still used as a bootloader for some PowerPC machines. You can try this out under qemu:

  $ qemu-system-ppc64
  VNC server running on ::1:5900

  $ vncviewer :0

  Ready!
  0 > 1 2 3 * + .
  7 ok
  0 > WORDS
  (gigantic list of built-in words ...)

And FWIW Open Firmware runs on x86 too.

According to Wikipedia[1] it's used in astronomy and aerospace. It's also used in OpenFirmware like in old PowerPC Mac and IBM computers.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

The Fedex handheld terminal was re-written in Forth... twice. :)

First time all the features wouldn't fit. Forth re-write fit with room to spare. (factoring is easy in Forth)

New Hardware! Everything fit but batteries didn't last a full shift. :(

Forth with a proprietary tasker put the device to sleep at every opportunity. Problem solved.

> factoring is easy in Forth

Even more than working in functional languages like SML, Forth (and RPL, my first stack language) taught me how to factor out code and remove/minimize duplication. It's just so obvious when using it where the duplication is, the hard part is coming up with decent names. But if a sequence of words can be given a good name, give it that name and define it.

In the gaming industry. The game Starflight was written in Forth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

Ok, this is an ancient example. But still :-)

The source code is partially available. Here one example.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030906110447/http://www.sonic....

You can install it on MCUs and use it to debug code pretty easily and makes it really nice to use reflection[1].

This use is not necessarily limited to enthusiasts, since nowadays even Arduino ends up in commercial products.

While the language itself it's considered difficult to read by some, it's a great way to access MCUs features in a stack-based way and at a level higher than assembly.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvTI3KmcZ7I

Third line of the introduction:

“...is still used today for certain applications.”

and is clickable.

See:

• https://www.forth.com/resources/who-uses-forth/

• https://vfxforth.com/#customers

(Curiously this also turned up on another thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165804 )

Here's an HN post on Forth in space!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164942

Space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com