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Comment by tlavoie | Hacker News Reader

DuskOS apparently runs on ARM, so one of these vape boards running FORTH would likely feel very roomy indeed.

I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth

Allow me to brag about romforth (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) which I ported to the "3c" Padauk and can run on really small rom/ram microcontrollers. Caveats: - tested only on an emulator SDCC/ucsim_pdk, not on real hardware - given how small the ram is, there is no user dictionary but new words can be defined and tested using what the Forth folks refer to as "umbilical hosting".

Even for a Forth, 3KB of RAM is rather tight. Dusk OS intentionally de-prioritize compactness and it couldn't run on that amount of RAM. It can get a C compiler loaded in about 100KB of RAM, but 3? not enough to boot.

OK, so we'd play with zForth then, as BogdanTheGeek notes here. That reminds me, I have a Scamp board sitting here on my desk that I really should play with more. https://udamonic.com/what-is-a-scamp.html

"we'd", you mean in a collapse scenario? Forths are, by nature, "collapse-friendly", but one particularity with Collapse OS and Dusk OS is that they are fully self-hosted. This includes the tools necessary to improve upon themselves.

From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.

One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.

Good points! Really, I should start with learning Forth on the devices I have first, before getting to concerned about others. ARM does seem like a useful target though, given that they're basically everywhere these days.

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