kitten VS porth

While not quite a Forth, Kitten is a stack language:

https://kittenlang.org/

Since you're making a statically-typed concatenative language, I'll point you to a joy reference, kitten, notes to motivate type checking stack languages, and a paper that formalizes type checking for stack languages. Since this looks like a relatively high-level stack language (given the presence of ADTs), you may find that you want to add quotes to your language, specifically opaque quotes since your language is typed. In that case, you'll realize that you'll need a better way to formulate polymorphism over stacks, and the paper on type checking will provide that to you.

Author ended up doing a lot of work on Kitten https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten

You may like https://kittenlang.org/

Like all other languages voted to the HN front page that claim that they have magically solved memory management, this project's website is simply lying.

Looking at https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten/issues/193: "Does kitten require garbage collection?" -- "Nope. [...] The plan is that boxed lists ([…], List) and closures ({…}) are reference-counted" and https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten/issues/131: "Explore GC strategies" -- "The C backend currently uses naïve reference counting."

A quick skim of kitten.c confirms that objects have a reference count field and are only really released when it drops to zero. (I didn't find code that increments the reference count, but I find it hard to care.)

The project's website claims:

> Automatic management of memory and resources with no garbage collector.

One can weakly argue that many people mean tracing garbage collection when they speak of garbage collection, and that reference counting is not garbage collection in this narrow sense. This is unhelpful at best.

The FAQ has the claim I quoted above, of which the "when you drop a value from the stack, it gets deallocated" appears to be simply false.

Yes, unless there's another language I'm unfamiliar that shares the name. But the inspiration and some core ideas came from Porth: https://gitlab.com/tsoding/porth

I personally haven't done that, but a very simple example, that I can think of is this one: porth-mode.el. The minor-mode doesen't do much, but maybe it helps understand the basic concepts.

You might want to look into Porth; IMO RPN doesn't have to be hard to read, Forth is just really terse and not very modern.

I believe Tsodings - Porth is a single pass compiler. Currently in development - it has some great vlogs and is also self hosting. He's recently said that re-implementing Porth straight up has become an issue for him - so please just take inspiration only. I suspect a concatenative language is quite a natural fit for a single pass compiler.

Tsoding did with his porth. Original conpiler written in python then reimplemented in porthq https://gitlab.com/tsoding/porth