planckforth VS factor

This reminds me a bit of how planck is implemented with planckforth. I can't tell you if there are pitfalls or not, but I can understand how it could be an interesting approach.

Show HN: PlanckForth – Bootstrapping an interpreter from handwritten 1kb binary\ (14 comments)

bootstrap.fs is a thing of beauty

https://github.com/nineties/planckforth/blob/main/bootstrap....

It starts off looking like line noise (the very simple interpreter defined in hex) and gradually turns into the forth we know and love.

Fantastic!

interpreter is designed to be very simple. Every built-in word is single-letter and the interpreter just repeats that reads a character, looks it up from the dictionary and executes it. Also there is no error checking.

This is the actual code for the first interpreter, which is a 136-byte implementation of the interpreter followed by a built-in dictionary of 888 bytes.

https://github.com/nineties/planckforth/blob/main/planck.xxd

The first interpreter and language is so esoteric that, for example, the Hello World looks like this.

    $ ./planck

Seems painful. I like this approach:

https://github.com/nineties/planckforth

You start with a very tiny address or bytecode interpreter, much smaller than 512 bytes. Then you load several levels of bootstrap interpreters into it until you have a fairly featureful Forth. So that occupies ram but not program space on the target computer. You would load the non-initial stuff from a remote computer that didn't have tiny memory constraints.

My impression so far is (in general), Forth are practically limited to doing embedded/microcontroller development.

For us, web/mobile/desktop app devs, beside:

- 8th (https://8th-dev.com)

- Factor (https://factorcode.org)

Any suggestion which implementation we should look for?

Factor is also very much worth a look. Forth-style syntax, but with many of the ideas from CL and Smalltalk as well. In fact as a CL fan, I was very impressed by it. It's also quite "batteries included" a la Python.

Otherwise, and more seriously, I'm not completely sure variables are needed. Factor is quite usable (it's my favorite go-to language if I quickly need to script something), and mostly doesn't have them.

There's a note on the page from 2022-08-19, that a lot has been added to it. It also links to the github page[1] for the up-to-date changes.

I am a Lisp, April, APL/J/BQE, and Forth[2] aficionado. I did some file munging programs in Factor back in 2012 at my job to sort through theater attendance logs in Word to compile statistics.

[1] https://github.com/remko/waforth

[2] https://factorcode.org/

Is there any "battery-included" ANS Forth (more or less like Python/Go) which provides access to concurrency, networking, database, GUI, etc?

Not an embedded device programmer, but mostly deals with frontend apps, and occasionally backend, so those are very relevant to me.

Or perhaps use "non-traditional" Forths like 8th (https://8th-dev.com) or Factor (https://factorcode.org)?

Here's my day two solution using Factor