I've been on/off working on a homebrew NES game. Pretty much the go-to environment for that is assembly, which I'm sure I could write if I were motivated, but I find assembly considerably un-fun so I wanted to use a higher-level language.
I had been looking for an excuse to learn Forth, and its use in classic computing meant that it had a shot of being workable on the NES.
I was initially using IceForth but I had trouble getting that working, and so I got Codex to generate something that works, but then I also that building your own Forth is sort of a rite of passage for a software engineer, so I have been building my own Forth from scratch.
My custom hack-job isn't ready yet, but I was extremely impressed at the performance I was able to get on the NES with compiled Forth from the Codex thing on the NES. I'm getting roughly 80% of the speed for equivalent programs written in assembly, with much less code and this is without advanced optimizations. I do plan on finishing my custom one because I think I can build what I want a bit better than Codex, and I'm optimistic I can get the performance reasonable.
Forth is such a fascinating language, because it sort of enables you to work at any level of the program. You can write it super high level, almost like Lisp, but you can also poke around and create mappings to assembly, and you can do all this with decent performance no less! It has quickly become one of my more favorite scripting languages, though that might be because I have always had a soft spot for RPN.
So implement four of them, and you will know them all! First Forth with indirect threaded code, second Forth with direct threaded code, third Forth with subroutine threaded code, and the final fourth with token threaded code.
You jest, but I did end up doing just that in my implementation (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) trying to shoehorn a Forth implementation into a MSP430 device with just 2KB ROM + 128 byte RAM
I doubt you will want to code professionally in Forth unless you work on embedded, so the dialect you learn doesn't matter too much. But it is interesting to implement a small interpreter and play with it.
I was expecting to see FORTH in bare metal C or ASM.
There is a common myth about newbie programmers that FORTH is write-only and that you need to type everything in one line, without comments or function calls etc.
Writing forth is super easy especially if you have a stack machine at your disposal. For example when you are building your own virtual cpu/architecture with assembler and compiler.
It's more trivial than to understand any JavaScript framework lol
Research FORTH more guys - it doesn't need to be strange and hard :)
I've been on/off working on a homebrew NES game. Pretty much the go-to environment for that is assembly, which I'm sure I could write if I were motivated, but I find assembly considerably un-fun so I wanted to use a higher-level language.
I had been looking for an excuse to learn Forth, and its use in classic computing meant that it had a shot of being workable on the NES.
I was initially using IceForth but I had trouble getting that working, and so I got Codex to generate something that works, but then I also that building your own Forth is sort of a rite of passage for a software engineer, so I have been building my own Forth from scratch.
My custom hack-job isn't ready yet, but I was extremely impressed at the performance I was able to get on the NES with compiled Forth from the Codex thing on the NES. I'm getting roughly 80% of the speed for equivalent programs written in assembly, with much less code and this is without advanced optimizations. I do plan on finishing my custom one because I think I can build what I want a bit better than Codex, and I'm optimistic I can get the performance reasonable.
Forth is such a fascinating language, because it sort of enables you to work at any level of the program. You can write it super high level, almost like Lisp, but you can also poke around and create mappings to assembly, and you can do all this with decent performance no less! It has quickly become one of my more favorite scripting languages, though that might be because I have always had a soft spot for RPN.
I've already done that---ANS Forth for the 6809 (https://github.com/spc476/ANS-Forth).
Advanced challenge: make it self-hosting.
Video where I demonstrate how I explore JONESFORTH using GDB:
https://youtu.be/giLsd-bik6A?si=Gwm3NJdUzyrmmopH
"if you know one forth, you know one forth"
So implement four of them, and you will know them all! First Forth with indirect threaded code, second Forth with direct threaded code, third Forth with subroutine threaded code, and the final fourth with token threaded code.
You jest, but I did end up doing just that in my implementation (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) trying to shoehorn a Forth implementation into a MSP430 device with just 2KB ROM + 128 byte RAM
I thought this was going to be a pun on the word "fourth", disappointed when I got to "final".
I doubt you will want to code professionally in Forth unless you work on embedded, so the dialect you learn doesn't matter too much. But it is interesting to implement a small interpreter and play with it.
This is a strange article imo.
I was expecting to see FORTH in bare metal C or ASM.
There is a common myth about newbie programmers that FORTH is write-only and that you need to type everything in one line, without comments or function calls etc.
Writing forth is super easy especially if you have a stack machine at your disposal. For example when you are building your own virtual cpu/architecture with assembler and compiler.
It's more trivial than to understand any JavaScript framework lol
Research FORTH more guys - it doesn't need to be strange and hard :)
ps. Lisp SUCKS
/rant
I was with you 'till the last line. :P
IMO Lisp is harder to implement than Forth, and LESS readable, butt MAYBE i fell into the same trap as others with Forth. hahaha