Gforth 1.0

(gforth.org)

131 points | by joshcsimmons 8 hours ago

5 comments

  • fallat 19 minutes ago
    The standard library is lacking some really nice conveniences. I'm working on correcting this and teaching Forth as a "grassroots" language for people who want to go back to the joy of programming as an art. The 100rabbits folks have already done a lot of work around proliferating that idea but I want to work outside of the Uxn machine that they use. Mark my words, us programmers are not phased by AI stealing the joy of programming :) The day job business programming, sure. But that was only fun sometimes. Forth will continue to exercise our brains and work through logic and data flow problems - skills we can bring to guiding agents for the day job.
  • Hendrikto 7 hours ago
    Some sorely needed context:

    > [Gforth is] a free, fast, featureful and portable implementation of the Forth 2012 language.

    > Gforth runs under GNU, BSD, and similar systems, MS Windows and MacOS X and should not be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC.

    • daitangio 6 hours ago
      If you love HP-RPN calculators, you may love Forth as well. Forth is a very interesting language, I find it a bit too complex for my little brain but give it a spin if, you have 2 free hours
      • mitxela 11 minutes ago
        For me, the most interesting thing about Forth is it's "thin-ness". Getting from machine code to a Forth REPL can take about 4 kilobytes.
  • anta40 4 hours ago
    Nice to see gforth is still being maintained.

    BTW, on the other side, looks like gforth still lacks the ability to create native OS executable, something like:

    gcc myprog.c -o myprog

    ?

    • jan_m_savage 4 hours ago
      That’s because Gforth is a threaded-code VM that saves dictionary images rather than compiling to native code.

      As you prolly know, Forth blurs compile time and run time in general, and there’s no so-called clean compile, then link boundary like in C.

      SwiftForth, VFX Forth, and iForth do emit real executables, and there are smaller native-code Forths for Linux too, but then the opportunity cost is losing Gforth’s portability and its standards-heavy library ecosystem.

    • nickcw 3 hours ago
      You may enjoy ccforth then which is a mostly gforth compatible compiler which compiles to native via C.

      https://github.com/ncw/ccforth

      I wrote it as an experiment in having both a forth interpreter and compiler running at the same time.

      • lebuffon 59 minutes ago
        Whoa! That is a really nice piece of work. Congrats!
  • iberator 29 minutes ago
    For people who doesn't know forth:

    Forth can have comments and doesn't need to be all at one line:)

    also labels works as functions etc.

    Its way more tradable language in real life than people think

  • jan_m_savage 6 hours ago
    and here is the tutorial: https://net2o.de/gforth/Tutorial.html