Jonesforth Alternatives

jonesforth reviews and mentions

• The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2024

  Even just reading through an existing implementation can be very enlightening. E.g. JonesForth (where like 90% of the assembly source is comments explaining everything in detail): https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort...

• Jonesforth – A sometimes minimal FORTH compiler and tutorial for Linux / i386
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2024
• As you learn Forth, it learns from you (1981)
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2024

  I think jonesforth is the most popular implementation teaching implementation: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort...

  Factor might be a counterexample if one considers it a Forth, the VM is in part implemented in C++: https://github.com/factor/factor

  I think it's portability and ease of development rather than CPU architecture complexity that makes someone pick C/C++ over assembly when implementing a Forth system. Because the Forth won't need much of the assembly language or obscure CPU instructions, the complexity of the architecture won't really matter to whoever is implementing it.

• Konilo: A personal computing system in Forth
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2024
• Thinking Forth: A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems [pdf]
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024

  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!

• Problem Running JonesFORTH
  1 project | /r/Forth | 11 Dec 2023

  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.

• Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?
  22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2023

  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/).

• Dusk OS: 32-bit Forth OS. Useful during first stage of civilizational collapse
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2023

  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.

• Making my own forth implementation
  5 projects | /r/Forth | 15 Jun 2023

  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

• Struggling with looping constructs, BEGIN WHILE REPEAT
  1 project | /r/Forth | 8 Jun 2023

  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.

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