discussion VS mstoical

> I would love a Forth with a type system. I don't know if that is heretical [...].

Mitch Bradley (of Open Firmware fame) thinks it’s old hat[1], so guess not. (He also thinks it won’t work though.) In general, people have tried a lot of times; there’s a number of postfix Lisps with type systems—Kitten mentioned elsethread, ActorForth[2], etc.; a low-level Forth, as in untyped cells on stack and no automatic memory management, I don’t think has been done to completeness (IIRC either Forth, Inc. or MPE have a standing offer for any that’s able to process their legacy code), but then C wouldn’t be complete by that standard either (and Rust far too limiting).

Honestly I’m not sure how well it would work—in C, you get a great deal of utility out of compound types, and classic cell-oriented Forth kind of sucks at even mildly complex datastructures—they are certainly possible, but being unable to manipulate them as values on the stack makes things quite unnatural. (And that’s where I draw the line of “postfix Lisps” like PostScript rather than Forths, as such manipulation doesn’t seem feasible without some sort of automatic memory management.)

[1] https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/79

[2] https://github.com/ActorForth/ActorForth

It’s not the minimum set of words you need, but it is practical. (This thread for example talks about a practical set of 32 words as a minimal starting set, and an impractical set of 7 which is 708 times slower haha https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/92 )

Also concerning the point 1, ForthHub/discussions should be also mentioned. A Forth implementation of an FFI to Java is discussed there now.

Have a look at the discussion "VALUE and TO" on GitHub/ForthHub.

With respect you've ignored the point I was making. There exist several Forth engines with native code-compilation, for instance VFX Forth, SwiftForth, and iForth.

> Typically the C version outperformed the Forth version by 3:1 or better, and I would not have known how to bridge that gap.

With a threaded-code Forth interpreter I'd expect the C version to outperform it by something closer to 5:1, so 3:1 doesn't sound too bad. The only way you can close the gap is with good quality native-code compilation.

> Nowadays with far larger caches Forth might do better, I haven't really worked with it for years.

It's interesting how advanced in CPU architecture change the relative performance of the different threading strategies. This has been nicely studied by the gforth folks. [0][1] Threaded-code interpreters still easily lose to optimising native-code compilers though, [2] and I expect they always will.

More on how Forth collides with low-level CPU matters: [3][4][5]

[0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threading/

[1] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threaded-code.html

[2] https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/88#issuecommen...

[3] The Behavior of Efficient Virtual Machine Interpreters on Modern Architectures - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12...

[4] Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters -

I'm not a C programmer, and it took a fair bit of help from folks here on HN to get it compiling (it was forked from a 20 year old C source), for which I'm grateful.

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/mstoical

Details I didn't include but should have (I wasn't sure I'd have any replies at all... I should have had more faith, sorry)

It's a bit of a ramble, sorry about that.

MSTOICAL[0] is a fork of an old C based Forth variant, it took some help from the HN community[1] to get it to compile in a modern 64 bit environment, for which I am very thankful. However, it uses AutoConf to configure, build, install, etc... and I can't for the life of me figure out how to remove all of that logic. (C isn't my primary language, I'm willing to learn that, but adding AutoConf on top of it was too much)

In order to work on that, I was willing to switch to Linux (Ubuntu)... got everything up and running for the most part, but then I couldn't access WikidPad[2], my local Wiki with my appointments, etc. I missed a doctors appointment because of that, so went back to Windows.

The issue is around wxWindows changing the names of variables in some calls. On Windows, you just download an EXE installer and you're good to go. I couldn't figure it out because the program seems to be unwilling to support newer Python versions. (I could be wrong)

I don't understand why they felt the need to make breaking changes to wxWindows, and the python is a bit too dense for me.

So finally... I'm back in Windows 10, and decided to try to craft together a twitter clone with a bunch of weird ideas that I tossed out at 3:30 am in a twitter thread, and put into a more coherent manifesto.[3]

[0] https://github.com/mikewarot/mstoical

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957273

[2] https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/iceberg/blob/main/MANIFESTO.md

Reviewing the documentation from Stoical[1], it occurs to me that fixed line length text is archaic, yet I'm new to this world of C programmers.

Is it reasonable to get rid of all the extra line breaks and make something that flows better on all screen sizes?

[1] - https://github.com/mikewarot/stoical/blob/main/doc/Stoical

That'd probably get you some way there already: https://github.com/mikewarot/stoical