stm8ef VS jonesforth

Thanks, GitHub URL: https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef

I'm a fan of the STM8 line, nice peripherals, and nice programming model if you are writing any assembler. Much cleaner than 8051. You can do debug with the STLink. There are free toolchains from ST as well as the open source SDCC compiler. There is even a nice Forth. Even if Forth does not interest you that set of pages has a lot of info about various STM8 devices.

This past week I've been on a mission to find the cheapest microcontroller that I can reasonably learn to program. I've gone down the STM8S 001 rabbit hole and found this https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef/wiki/STM8-eForth-Example-Code

An example: eForth for the STM8 lets you fit an interactive development system including compiler onto an mcu with 8Kb flash and 1kB ram. Very useful for testing and exploratory development in systems that are otherwise far to small to support it.

Eventually you're going to need someone to help explain what on earth is going on here. Fortunately Thomas Göppel the maintainer of STM8 eForth has done that in a very readable explanation of FOR .. NEXT and how to use it.

It's always a multi dimensional spectrum of cost, performance, peripherals, development support, availability, family reach, etc. I personally really like STM8 microcontrollers for their simplicity and very low cost (can be less than 30 cents). There's actually another project that brings Forth to STM8: https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef It has very good documentation and I recommend anyone to take a look

I used the discussions feature to express my thanks a few days ago. Might be better than opening an issue? https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef/discussions/386

Cool. Here are some other resources that I've encountered along the way of learning Forth:

- JonesForth: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort...

This is legit a text that goes the an x86 Forth implementation. Actually, it's just an implementation with really extensive comments. That said, including whitespace and comments, it's just 2000 lines and the pedagogy is excellent. Highly recommended for anyone who would rather see behind the curtain before picking up a larger text.

- SmithForth: https://dacvs.neocities.org/SF/

So, Smith decided to hand-write a Forth directly in x86-64 opcodes (well, the corresponding ascii hex bytes). It's incredibly slim and enlightening how you can bootstrap a language in just a couple hundred bytes or so.

This project actually inspired me to really learn the x86-64 architecture, so I ended up hand-decompiling the SmithForth binary instead of going through his commented implementation. Hand-decompilation is an absolutely fascinating exercise. You learn all about ELF structure, opcode encodings, and actually start to see the gaps where microarchitectural details shine through. Highly recommended for any hacker that really wants to grok low level details.

- Mecrisp: https://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/

An amazingly fast Forth implementation for MSP430, ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, and some FPGAs. This gave me one really nice understanding of Forth as

    A REPL into your hardware!

I've git-cloned JonesFORTH (https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesforth.S) and achieved to compile it (i.e. run make w/o an error. When I start the executable, it presents me with an empty line, and when I say BYE, it says PARSE ERROR: bye.

Is there any particular language you're looking for? I've found some languages hideous until I understood them and could appreciate their respective graces. Off the top of my head the I can think of a couple.

The first is Jones Forth (https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth), start with jonesforth.S and move into jonesforth.f. I really enjoyed following along with it and trying my hand at making my own stack based language.

The other is Xv6, a teaching operating system from MIT (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2021/xv6.html), not all the code or implementations are top notch but it shows you non-optimized versions (just because they're simple and more readable) of different concepts used in OS design.

If you're interested in the embedded world, there is a really neat project I've been following that feels a more structured and safe (as in fault-tolerant) while still staying pretty simple (both conceptually and in the code itself): Hubris and Humility (https://hubris.oxide.computer/).

Very low hardware requirements, so basic industrial control at the level where you'd otherwise use an Arduino or so but on scavenged hardware. Forth is ridiculously simple to get an implementation running.

https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort...

Is a nice starting point. It's obviously not as compact as say 'Brainfuck' but it is far more versatile.

OP mentioned jonesforth, but linked to a nasm port of it. Which is probably good it’s just that the documentation in the comments with ascii art doesn’t look right on my screen. So here’s a more common repo: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth

Rip the asm macros for the basic FORTH words out of this and then embed them in a C binary, statically linked with your favourite libs for whatever task. Although I haven't tried this yet, I'm planning on doing it with ncurses for my own Roguelike. From there, if you can convert the function calls and your parameters down to raw numbers, you can send instructions to ncurses or whatever other API you like, directly from a FORTH stack.

or the mirror of this site in github: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth