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This reminds me of the excellent shareware game for the Mac called RoboWar [1] by David Harris. In it, you programmed a robot to destroy other programmed robots in an arena. You could spend points on different weapons, shields, and processor speed.

The programming language was a custom stack-based language like Forth. It worked quite well for its purpose, as you could easily count instructions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar

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Minecraft had a mod with Forth support: https://technicpack.fandom.com/wiki/Forth_language

And so those Minetest: https://github.com/Ekdohibs/forth_computer (it seems to be an unsafe mod tho cause I see it loads shared libraries).

There's less demand for this in Minetest, though, because modding Minetest is already super easy in Lua—you don't have to learn Java like you do for Minecraft. But you can't load a Lua mod even in Minetest if you don't run the server.

Mobile-code environments for mutually distrusting code turn out to be more difficult than people used to think, but now we have multiple off-the-shelf battle-tested implementations of JS for that. And you can coerce Lua to do it, kind of.

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