Subj : Re: Any love for Forth?!
To   : lodger
From : tenser
Date : Sun Apr 06 2025 02:12:48

On 01 Apr 2025 at 08:27p, lodger pondered and said...
 
 lo> Since then, I've written a fair amount of code (mind you, I'm still just
 lo> a beginner) and so I wonder: are thereany retro computing people here
 lo> who are also fond of the Forth programming language?!

Ha!  Funny you should mention that; we have a custom bootloader
that we wrote for doing bringup on our custom server boards.  We
usually want to upload a kernel and a ramdisk over a UART and get
it to start running, and we've got a syntax for receiving the
kernel, expanding it (we send it over the UART compressed because
we're not masochists), loading it into memory so that its various
bits and pieces are where they're expected to be once it starts
running and the BSS is zeroed and so forth, and then jumping into
its entry point.  But I was dissatisfied with how it works; in
particular, the kernel you upload is already in the ramdisk you
send, so sending both seems kind of silly, and when you jump into
the kernel (which, from the hardware's perspective just looks like
a function call) you need to pass the physical address and size of
the ramdisk as parameters, but our syntax didn't really support
that.

So I rewrote it, implementing a read-only version of the filesystem
that we use for the ramdisk (UFS, in our case) _and_ introducing a
stack and the means to duplicate the element at the top of the stack,
so that we can send everything in one go.  When I demoed it to some
colleagues they said, "why not just implement a FORTH interpreter?"
so I rewrote it recently.  In particular, when you call into the
I mean, maybe.

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