Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video] | Hacker News Reader

Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video]

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89 pointsnetten61 comments

Posting a quick TL;DW. A minute into the video Chuck Moore says that Windows updates (on 11 and 10) have caused colorForth to crash, with Chuck thinking it's a graphical problem. I may comment more, but I wanted to post this because I don't see it mentioned as a youtube comment.

Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?

If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and removed those because they're legacy. Modern rendering pipelines don't work that way anymore." I don't WANT a rendering pipeline! I want a surface, and to make calls to scribble on it! That's it!

> Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?

Very unlikely. Far too many applications depend on those things. It's more likely that they accidentally changed something subtle that happened to break colorForth.

> If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and

The Wayland idea looks very similar to a Microsoft brain extract: "trust us, it will be the best when it is ready", "your program doesn't work ? update to latest version", "we have updates: we disabled some things which worked before".

The whole GNOME/FD.o complex has been like that for decades. GNOME's founding document is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck". Its whole thesis is: Unix style system integration is old and busted; the new hotness is Windows style system integration.

But for decades, Microsoft has been willing to support and work on the ancient tech that got it where it is today. The GNOME/FD.o paradigm is like Mao's continuous revolution. Out with the old and in with the new, forever and always, on an ongoing basis. Microsoft is now changing to this model. I suspect it's for similar pragmatic reasons: it's difficult to recruit young and relatively inexperienced programmers if you're just going to put them to work fixing up code bases from the 90s (written in—brotha, eugh!—C and C++). Since we can't get anybody to maintain that old code, it will become a liability in the future, so we're better off throwing it out and telling our users to cope.

I'm guessing a lot of the legacy stuff that still uses it also depends on some other things they wanted to change too?

I have yet to read one single story where people are actually happy with Windows 11.

I wonder how well Proton would work for it...

It looks like colorForth runs in qemu or bochs according to documentation, so Proton/wine wouldn't be required.

I could've sworn I saw something in the last month or two about BITBLT or DirectX changes on Windows.

It wouldn't surprise me to find that Windows is now flagging and quarantining unsigned, unfamiliar executables that it catches making these draw calls or really any direct Win32 calls. Microsoft, and in particular Windows Defender which you can't really turn off anymore, has gotten pretty aggressive about blocking software for "security purposes".

Are we going from "the only stable ABI on Linux is Wine", to "the only stable ABI is Wine"?

(Especially now that .NET Framework was donated to Wine...)

> Especially now that .NET Framework was donated to Wine...

Do you mean Mono, or did I miss something?

Yes, I misremembered some things. Apparently Mono has more compatibility with .NET Framework (for instance 4.81) than dotnet (the current, modern recently released in version 10).

I mixed that up to mean that .NET Framework proper was released as open source, but that's unfortunately not the case.

Mono. Not .net fw.

If there is, does anyone have any info on this?

Very impressive to see Chuck Moore still going at it at the age of 87. I hope at that age I'm able to handle the minutiae of programming!

Totally! At 87 that's gutsy! My very first paid programming work was in Forth on a 6502 platform in the '60s, building a networked accounting and flow management program for a water company, but I'm now 81 and very glad to be retired.

Was your work on the 6502 perhaps in the 70s?

This was after and before the work on the time travel chip

My dad is in his mid 60's, and I'm pretty convinced he's going to be like that. He's not a software engineer, mostly a mechanical engineer, but it's pretty rare that I talk to him and he's not hacking on something mechanical.

I'm not talking just woodshop stuff; he is actually doing math and calculations for little things that he's building. He is an engineer by blood that happened to make a career out of it.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/optimizations-fo...

From the website; Optimizations for windowed games improves gaming on your PC by using a new presentation model for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 games that appear in a window or in a borderless window.

When these optimizations are used, games that originally use the legacy blt-model presentation can use the newer flip-model presentation instead (if the game is compatible). This results in lower frame latency and lets you use other newer gaming features; for example, Auto HDR, and variable refresh rate (for displays that support it).

It is checked by default. Hope it helps.

I wonder sometimes if there's an earlier level of technology that society could basically "checkpoint" at and freeze, and then build off of. Capitalism today feels like it's hit the Red Queen Paradox - it goes around and around to keep the money flowing, but with very little actual progress. Indeed, most people seem to feel like the world is getting worse for all that work, and that many of the innovations of the last ~10-15 years are "fixing" things that weren't problems to begin with while creating new problems. And yet because all the substrate is shifting around, even if you don't break something someone else will. Could we go back to a world of redundant interchangeable parts where if somebody breaks something, you just cut them off and use a substitute that works just as well?

Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

You may be interested in Dusk OS, the 32 bit Forth based operating system for the first stage of civilizational collapse: https://duskos.org/

Thanks for the mention. The philosophy behind Dusk is also eerily relevant to Chuck's problem at the moment. To quote my own manifest[1]:

  When you operate a system, there is no problem that can arise that will make you powerless. Sure, you can have a hardware failure that hopelessly breaks your system, but at least you'll be able to identify that failure and know for sure that there is no software solution or workaround. That's control.

In this situation, of course Windows is to blame. But it could also happen with Linux, even if it's to a much much lesser degree.

If an update breaks your software in a way that is obscure enough to break only your software, then nobody else will fix your problem, and the system as a whole is too complex for you to dive in, making you powerless.

[1]: https://duskos.org/who.html

That is super cool.

What level of computing would you checkpoint at? https://saul.pw/mag/computer/

Using your scale? ↑7 or ↑8. That seemed to be the sweet spot in capabilities to me, without getting to the point where engagement eats everything else including productivity and future maintenance.

Using semiconductor process nodes? 45-65nm. That was around the point that Moore's Law broke down. At that point, you could do most of the functionality that we depend upon computers for (eg. GUIs, 3D rendering, networking, basic machine-learning, some speech recognition and text synthesis). It also roughly corresponds to ↑7 or ↑8 on your scale, so it's self-consistent.

Conceptually? I'd like to have multiple checkpoints, so that if the ecosystem gets borked you can roll back further.

I agree. Enough to run Quake over LAN, not quite enough to run WoW. A lot of complexity in computing is only necessary for dealing with the internet at scale.

Technology is cultural. People invent what they invent according of the culture that they live in and that orients their needs. Lot of cultures are not producing technology and those culture are not less advanced, just different. There is no going back, because there is no back or ahead. Change the culture, change the kind of technology people will create.

Why is your premise that this state of society is intrinsically caused by technological progress? The issues you describe seem to me a product of general economic trends.

It is sad to see. I understand where he is coming from though. He is 87 and doesn't think recoding a super niche' software tool is the best use of what very well may be his last few years of life. He still seems super sharp though and is a major inspiration.

What would be the best use of his last few years? Sitting in an easy chair by the pool?

Using your last few years to exercise your brain and ward off cognitive decline might be the best way to ensure those last few years are fulfilling and not just marking time before the end.

That's quite a dichotomy here. He can exercise his brain and ward off cognitive decline without working on Colorforth specifically...

Some people have trouble doing meaningless intellectual pursuits like crosswords, sudoku etc.

Working on Colorforth might be the greatest meaning in his life.

He himself said he didn't think it was worth it anymore and that he very rarely codes now. I respect him enough to assume he has some other pursuit more worthy of his attention.

Maybe he's been suffering a cognitive decline that makes coding much less rewarding.

I suppose there's meaning in searching for abstract logical truths, but he might have other such pursuits. Or, he might even feel that it's mostly done already and became just another boring software maintenance project.

It's hard to imagine an extremely niche software tool to be the greatest meaning in someone's life.

Still the same dichotomy. Who's to say his other pursuits are "meaningless", and the likes of crosswords, sudoku, etc.? For all we know he might have some other projects that he considers more useful.

He does not think working on Colorforth is worth it anymore, so it could actually be detrimental to do so.

>> Some people have trouble doing meaningless intellectual pursuits like crosswords, sudoku etc.

My Dad is like this. I'm like this. My son is like this.

Unless we're busy, pushing ourselves to build something, fix something or just outside doing something we don't feel the reward.

My Dad told his motto, "A rolling rock gathers no moss - until it finally stops rolling." He told me that in his 50's - he's in his 80's still out in the garage refinishing old furniture and giving it away. The drive the man has just never burns out.

Yeah! I can definitely see myself doing that. I told family and friends that my ideal way of death is a quick death by the computer when I'm over 80 working on some projects. I just have to move forward in some direction.

Perhaps he has chosen the best use of his last few years to his own satisfaction, and doesn't feel the need to share every last detail about himself on the internet.

He specifically mentions hiking and staying healthy, I'd imagine he's not going to stop using his brain completely.

> What would be the best use of his last few years? Sitting in an easy chair by the pool?

That's completely up to him, and if that's what he wants to do, then that's the best use. No one can say what is best for anyone else.

Isn't that part of the Forth mantra though, to be written to the lowest level possible, eschewing portability, interoperability, hard coding fonts, etc., to achieve the simplest, most minimal implementation possible?

https://www.ultratechnology.com/forth.htm

Forth is generally all about minimalism as I understand it, but that has nothing to do with what I wrote. I was just saying the man obviously wants to focus on something else at this stage of his life and that is perfectly okay. I think he might port to Raspberry Pi if he was a few years younger, but he pointed out that he didn't think it was worth it at this point.

must. not. go. too. deep. into. forth. rabbithole.

s" must" . s" not" . s" go" . s" too" . s" deep" . s" into" . s" forth" . s" rabbithole" .

When you go down the rabbit hole in Forth, it is easy to pop back out.

Actually it is-

    s" rabbithole" .s" forth" .s" into" .s" deep" .s" too" .s" go" .s" not" .s" must" .

    $ gforth
    Gforth 0.7.3, Copyright (C) 1995-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    Gforth comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `license'
    Type `bye' to exit
    s" rabbithole" .s" forth" .s" into" .s" deep" .s" too" .s" go" .s" not" .s" must" . 
    :1: Undefined word
    s" rabbithole" >>>.s"<<< forth" .s" into" .s" deep" .s" too" .s" go" .s" not" .s" must" .
    Backtrace:
    $7F53D6EF5A68 throw 
    $7F53D6F0BDB0 no.extensions 
    $7F53D6EF5D28 interpreter-notfound1                                           ::
    : ws s" rabbithole " s" forth " s" into " s" deep " s" too " s" go " s" not "  compiled
    s" must " 8 0 do type loop ;  ok
    ws must not go too deep into forth rabbithole  ok

>>He is 87 and doesn't think recoding a super niche' software tool is the best use of what very well may be his last few years of life.

Know quite a few elderly men, were moving mountains until retirement, then at one age they wanted to simply step back and relax. It was a cognitive downhill from there on. Also there is something strange about men sitting at home doing nothing. For some reasons families start hating as little as a sentence from them. You have to sit quiet for most of your life. Which honestly speaking is nothing short of a punishment, because you are actually expected to behave like furniture, or at best like a vegetable.

Even other wise I do see men who retired early not having all that a great time sitting at home and doing nothing.

Without a purpose, you won't enjoy living life much.

Yep, in China there was a research that says retirement is a major killer for certain elder people (forgot the details but most likely just statistics of the number of years between retirement and death). I don’t know. I’d like to find a calling and die working on it.

if he's not going to maintain it anymore can't he at least open source it?

It's public domain, sort of.

" Updated 2002 September Philosophy

My attitude about software is that it expresses ideas that cannot be owned. Attempting to assert ownership is undesirable and impossible.

So, although colorForth is infinitely valuable, I place it in the Public Domain to make it freely available to anyone for any purpose. There is plenty of money to be made by porting code, programming applications and teaching.

I am having a fine time using colorForth. I won't spend much time promoting it. This site is my attempt to gauge the market. I will rigidly control the version I use."

But when you go to the downloads you see this:

"Download You can download colorForth thanks to UltraTechnology.

Downloads are still available. But note that COLOR.COM can only run under DOS - not Windows. As you can see above, it's 9 years old and I no longer know how to run it. The current version is available at GreenArrays

    COLOR.COM Jul31
    boot.asm, floppy source
    gen.asm, generic graphics source
    color.asm, kernel source

This is the exact version I'm using, limited only in the amount of source code provided. It's a 63KB .COM program. You're welcome to use it as you please. But it's a powerful tool, so please be careful."

See https://colorforth.github.io/

Well, that's upsetting.

Microsoft: not even once.

It hurts so much to see a the creator of such an important thing try to convince a random kid why what he did was a success.

Seems like a legend might be leaving the craft due to MICROS~1.

Honestly, I don't understand this. AFAIK colorForth was a standalone system for Pentium class machines. How do Windows updates come into this?

How about trying to run it on ReactOS?

Sad. Yet another victim to the inexorable march of the enshittification of technology in the name of "updates" and "security".

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