wasm2ps VS porth

It's come up in discussions I've been in before, mostly with the PostScript document language, since you can run programs on your printer with PS, albeit incredibly slowly. I've written a roundabout C-to-printer compiler of sorts which compiles WASM code to PS, and it is admittedly even slower because it doesn't do much on the stack. But stack languages and linear logic have a pretty neat correspondence.

I'm not a fan of the usual uses of S-expressions in data formats, but for quite the opposite reasons. People seem to have a thing for making up new syntax, so you can't just throw a normal S-expression parser at the problem, and be done with it. For example, the wasm2ps reader [1] has to know how to read a comment in the WebAssembly text format. I decided to leave the project at handling integer instructions and control flow only, as there are other oddities like using a single atom for alignment and offsets in load and store instructions [2]. Some people I've talked to wished that people would stop inventing ad-hoc syntaxes, and just use S-expressions or something. Using S-expressions but adding more ad-hoc syntax gives you the worst of both options.

While admittedly less of a problem for implementation, it is also annoying to see lists with dangling parens on their own lines, and symbols with underscores or camelCase in the names, once you are used to the normal way of formatting Lisp code.

[1] https://github.com/no-defun-allowed/wasm2ps/blob/master/Code...

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

Here's an interesting solution: in the language Porth which was inspired by forth (but takes some drastically different choices), there's an option to create separate scored bindings, which can either consume items from the top of the stack, or duplicate them, leading to some very slick solutions to the problem of limited access to the stack.

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