openfirmware VS forth

OpenFirmware has some code for paging! ;)

purpose: Set up page tables and turn on paging

https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/cpu/x86...

NeWS didn't use FORTH. But HyperTIES used both FORTH and NeWS because there were a lot of things that FORTH could do that NeWS couldn't, like link and call C code. The FORTH I used was Mitch Bradley's "Sun Forth", which evolved into OpenFirmware, and which was once defined by an IEEE standard, "IEEE 1275-1994", but it was withdrawn because the standard was not reaffirmed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

>Open Firmware is described by IEEE standard IEEE 1275-1994, which was not reaffirmed by the Open Firmware Working Group (OFWG) since 1998 and has therefore been officially withdrawn by IEEE.

It's still alive and maintained and used for many things. Here's the source code, called OpenBIOS:

https://github.com/openbios

https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware

https://openfirmware.info

https://openfirmware.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS

Some Forth systems even have a "metacompiler" that lets one FORTH system compile another FORTH system for the same or different CPU, word size, byte order, threading model, etc, from the same source code!

OpenFirmware (the FORTH burnt into boot roms of SPARC, PowerPC, OLPC, and other systems) is a great example:

openfirmware/forth/kernel/metacompile.fth

https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/d5cc657ce81c0f...

>You don't write README.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, JavaDocs, etc, at all?

Maybe? Not sure - haven't worked on enough big projects to declare answer

>A new developer is supposed to go through all the codebases and figure out for himself?

Yes to this bit - code should have very clear structure to it with appropriate comments attached, whether that's literate style as JonesForth<https://github.com/phf/forth/blob/master/x86/jonesforth.S> shows, small section header comment or whatever.

It should be very clear what section exploring does - tiny example but cat <http://9p.io/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cat.c> from plan 9 very simple segmented code - deals with file opening in main loop and cat function just reads and prints text

JONESFORTH is good read if want source to explore

You're very welcome.

For later exploration, JonesForth <https://github.com/phf/forth/tree/master/x86> is excellent exploration of Forth's internals.