ForthOS - standalone operating system written in Forth | Hacker News Reader

ForthOS - standalone operating system written in Forth

forthos.org

75 pointszephyrfalcon20 comments

It's an absolute breeze to boot from the install ISO via QEMU. It boots pretty much instantaneously, and after that you just need to know Forth:

http://i.imgur.com/EjbhP.png

Incidentally, I really like this Forth's version of a locals mechanism: http://www.forthos.org/lvars.html

can you share the instructions for getting ForthOS on QEMU?

I tried it using Q on MacOSX, and I don't see the last line of output. ie., the FORTH prompt.

I downloaded Q v0.9.0a89 here: http://www.kju-app.org/ I ran the app and created a new VM instance with "operating system" set to "Live CD". Under the hardware configuration options that are available I set "CD-ROM" to "Choose DiskImage..." and selected the ForthOS .iso. I also set "Hard Disk" to "New compressed 100mb diskimage". This step seems to be the key- ForthOS expects your machine to have a hard drive.

After that just start the machine, select the first option in the boot menu and you should be gold.

Thanks!

The bit about Hard disk was helpful. I have the OS working.

A previous operating system by Andy Valencia is VSTa http://www.vsta.org:8080/. This has been forked and is called FMI/OS http://www.code-unatio.net/wiki/fmios/.

Back in the day, pretty much all Forth implementations were standalone operating systems, or at least capable of being run stand-alone. This was one of its great virtues--you could port it to new hardware in an afternoon. Just write disk block I/O, console I/O, write the image to disk blocks (or maybe ROM if you were embedded) and get a boot loader going.

This is old, the iso was created in '04 and the newsgroup hasn't had a posting since '06. Is it still active?

Apparently the thing is completely bootstrapped and self-hosting. This, to me is one of the most impressive features.

Congrats, this is really impressive. Hopefully I'll have some free time in the next few months to try it out. Never used Forth before, so I might give it a bit of a go sometime soon. Any good further resources other than the wiki page?

GForth, a popular ANS-Forth implementation, has very extensive documentation: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/

This particular Forth is based on the eForth dialect. There isn't a ton of documentation that I'm aware of, but it's almost entirely self-hosted, and if you can read Forth the source is fairly short and well-commented: http://www.baymoon.com/~bimu/forth/

For a gentle introduction to Forth I recommend Starting Forth (http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/) followed by Thinking Forth (http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/), both by Leo Brodie.

I'd just like to note how fun the book Starting Forth is. It's a bit like The Little Lisper in that it's entertaining (there are comics), but thicker, with a fuller treatment of the material.

Thanks guys, great resources! I have a massive flight coming up so I'll have a chance to get into Forth during that!

I can't get the ISO to boot via VirtualBox (on OS X if it matters). Did anyone else try this? It stops at:

[Multiboot-kludge, loadaddr=0x100000, text-and-data=0x51280, bss=0x0, entry=0x100044]

Why is it so many forth websites look so... plain?

Simple: The average Forth developer has absolutely zero interest in fancy user interfaces and design.

Because they spent more time on the code than they do on the wrappings. Forth is a really neat, minimalist language, that minimalism is probably a selection criterion for the way people would look at the websites hosting this stuff. Likely they see it as just another mass storage device.

Personally I think we could do with a bit more of this and less eye candy, I've seen tons of really nicely packaged blog posts announcing some project or other only to see it founder a couple of months, weeks or sometimes even days later.

I'd much prefer people first building something and announcing it on a 'crappy' web page like this.

Yes!

I imagine they wanted to access the site from the OS itself, with a text-only browser.

I think that goes for a lot of programming languages. You're just "spoiled" by some sites of languages heavily involved in web programming (and especially the sites of the frameworks and libraries used for that). I'm actually a bit wary about "beautiful" sites, as often it means that this is "web designer code"…

Also: age. Not many Forth sites are very recent, so often you'll gaze into the abyss that is the 20th century web…

Great work...

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