4 ms·
In a real practical application, if you properly evaluate Forth for doing Embedded solutions, then it becomes a real viable option considering the alternatives.
by spaintech 4y ago
In a real practical application, if you properly evaluate Forth for doing Embedded solutions, then it becomes a real viable option considering the alternatives. First thing is readability of a DSL for an embedded project, working through the HAL that are created just to communicate with the hardware is a real PITA, but forgoing that even further, creating your own DSL for the HW layer is extremely useful even for the HW teams, you can be calling connection the same for once, Pins will be Pins, you will SENDRESPONCE PIN20 etc. Furthermore, you can be doing unit testing with in the development phase not after, so that eases the debugging of the SW and expedites time to do integrated validation. Further more, the interactiveness of FORTH is a unique experience, it makes the little MCU feel like a complete system. There was a recent posting in youtube that best describes this, and IMHO, it’s a hard to beat option as you den with in a MCU, validate each of the function words in Forth to ensure that bit of the code is working. Finally, you don’t need a lot of the dedicated hardware to debug, you are with in the system and you can read the register and memory interactively, so no surprises. If you consider al this, then it’s IMHO a hard option to pass up for this kind of work. Here is the video I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVbARJ8QsA&t=3120s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVbARJ8QsA&t=3120s Cheers!
- dublin 4y agoA little-known fact is that the entire preboot environment in Sun's UltraSPARC machines was really just Forth. It was possible to modify that Forth code to do more or different things than what the factory intended, and Sun actually had documentation on how to do that, IIRC. I really miss having an innovative, open-source friendly hardware manufacturer like Sun around - they were an extraordinary group of people. (I worked for them for a while in the late 90s, and it really was a great company, with by far the best tech-company culture I've ever encountered...)
- erichocean 4y agohttps://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/
- krackout 4y agoI share the same feelings for Sun, mourned when it was bought by Oracle.
- Avshalom 4y agoOpenFirmware still exists, https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lesson_9 https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lesson_9 is a nice tutorial for forth/openfirmware.