the-super-tiny-compiler VS jonesforth

Now, those concepts are a whole entire world to explore, and this is out of the scope of this article. I suggest the reading of the Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of the book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom for a wider (but still practical) understanding of those subjects. Another practical great resource to look at is The SuperTiny Compiler. To explore them from a theorical point of view, you can find A LOT of resources from books or courses online.

The super tiny compiler by Jamie

I am currently writing a much more intricate version of the Super Tiny Compiler (https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler) in Rust, only I plan on handling many basic operations, essentially a compiler for a MUCH simpler version of Go. Great project idea btw, for anyone who wants to explore compilers. But in doing so, have really found a new respect for just what is going on when you gcc -o garbageprogram mytrashcode.c

Here, at least take this floatie: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler

Outside of this, I recently learned about The Super Tiny Compiler which was a project written to be read. Mind you, it has a vast amount of comments, which may be more of a leg-up than you're asking for.

You could start here:

https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler

That converts from lisp-like to javascript. Really though this is a big field, and there are lots of resources out there.

To get started look at your input language; you'll need to lex and parse that. Then massage the parsed structure into the appropriate output.

You can see me convert brainfuck to C, or x86 assembly language here:

https://github.com/skx/bfcc

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