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I had my third go at Forth this year and I can say it finally clicked, to the point that I ended up buying a license for a commercial compiler for non trivial s

I had my third go at Forth this year and I can say it finally clicked, to the point that I ended up buying a license for a commercial compiler for non trivial stuff. If I may hijack this conversation: I'll be trying T3X [0] next, and know about the usual suspects B, BCPL and MCPL. They seem fun but not as malleable as Forth. Can HN recommend other (don't care if obscure) typeless programming languages? [0] https://t3x.org/t3x/index.html https://t3x.org/t3x/index.html

e12e 7y ago
Which compiler, and for what purpose - did you end up buying? What does it give you beyond the many open implementations? On a side note - anyone know if greenarrays is still delivering hw? Those multicore forth chips really seemed nice (and crazy).
- TurboHaskal 7y ago
  Mostly performance. GForth is slow compared to the optimising compilers (I know about gforth-fast already). Also I don't care that much about open source. I'm old enough not to be opposed to the idea of buying compilers. I ended up with iForth which is well priced, targets 64bit and has a simple license. Here's a feature list http://users.bart.nl/users/mhx/i4faq.html http://users.bart.nl/users/mhx/i4faq.html SwiftForth and VFX are awesome as well but 32bit only and can't justify paying that much at this point.
  - e12e 7y ago
    Hm, I hadn't really thought about optimizing compilers for forth... I wonder if the strategies are different than for eg c or Pascal compilers. I guess the situation is simalar for other closed compilers (Intel c, high perf Java compiler/VMs etc).
exikyut 7y ago
I've always been really, really curious about the GA144 devkit for a while: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/, http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB014-190520-EVB002.pdf http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB014-190... The only small caveat is that it's basically $500 for a PCB with two chips on it. (And a prototyping area, SRAM, an Ethernet PHY, SD, and USB...) I'll probably continue to remain curious for some time, heh.

e12e 7y ago

Which compiler, and for what purpose - did you end up buying? What does it give you beyond the many open implementations? On a side note - anyone know if greenarrays is still delivering hw? Those multicore forth chips really seemed nice (and crazy).

TurboHaskal 7y ago
Mostly performance. GForth is slow compared to the optimising compilers (I know about gforth-fast already). Also I don't care that much about open source. I'm old enough not to be opposed to the idea of buying compilers. I ended up with iForth which is well priced, targets 64bit and has a simple license. Here's a feature list http://users.bart.nl/users/mhx/i4faq.html http://users.bart.nl/users/mhx/i4faq.html SwiftForth and VFX are awesome as well but 32bit only and can't justify paying that much at this point.
- e12e 7y ago
  Hm, I hadn't really thought about optimizing compilers for forth... I wonder if the strategies are different than for eg c or Pascal compilers. I guess the situation is simalar for other closed compilers (Intel c, high perf Java compiler/VMs etc).

exikyut 7y ago

I've always been really, really curious about the GA144 devkit for a while: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/, http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB014-190520-EVB002.pdf http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB014-190... The only small caveat is that it's basically $500 for a PCB with two chips on it. (And a prototyping area, SRAM, an Ethernet PHY, SD, and USB...) I'll probably continue to remain curious for some time, heh.