6 ms·
Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- delish 11mo agoPosting a quick TL;DW. A minute into the video Chuck Moore says that Windows updates (on 11 and 10) have caused colorForth to crash, with Chuck thinking it's a graphical problem. I may comment more, but I wanted to post this because I don't see it mentioned as a youtube comment.
- remexre 11mo agoI wonder how well Proton would work for it...
- jz_ 11mo agoIt looks like colorForth runs in qemu or bochs according to documentation, so Proton/wine wouldn't be required.
- aaron_m04 11mo agoI could've sworn I saw something in the last month or two about BITBLT or DirectX changes on Windows.
- chris_wot 11mo agoIf there is, does anyone have any info on this?
- bitwize 11mo agoIt wouldn't surprise me to find that Windows is now flagging and quarantining unsigned, unfamiliar executables that it catches making these draw calls or really any direct Win32 calls. Microsoft, and in particular Windows Defender which you can't really turn off anymore, has gotten pretty aggressive about blocking software for "security purposes".
- actionfromafar 11mo agoAre we going from "the only stable ABI on Linux is Wine", to "the only stable ABI is Wine"? (Especially now that .NET Framework was donated to Wine...)
- Figs 11mo ago> Especially now that .NET Framework was donated to Wine... Do you mean Mono, or did I miss something?
- actionfromafar 11mo agoYes, I misremembered some things. Apparently Mono has more compatibility with .NET Framework (for instance 4.81) than dotnet (the current, modern recently released in version 10). I mixed that up to mean that .NET Framework proper was released as open source, but that's unfortunately not the case.
- butvacuum 11mo agoMono. Not .net fw.
- bitwize 11mo agoDid Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls? If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and removed those because they're legacy. Modern rendering pipelines don't work that way anymore." I don't WANT a rendering pipeline! I want a surface, and to make calls to scribble on it! That's it!
- eternityforest 11mo agoI'm guessing a lot of the legacy stuff that still uses it also depends on some other things they wanted to change too?
- mwcampbell 11mo ago> Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls? Very unlikely. Far too many applications depend on those things. It's more likely that they accidentally changed something subtle that happened to break colorForth.
- hulitu 11mo ago> If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and The Wayland idea looks very similar to a Microsoft brain extract: "trust us, it will be the best when it is ready", "your program doesn't work ? update to latest version", "we have updates: we disabled some things which worked before".
- bitwize 11mo agoThe whole GNOME/FD.o complex has been like that for decades. GNOME's founding document is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck". Its whole thesis is: Unix style system integration is old and busted; the new hotness is Windows style system integration. But for decades, Microsoft has been willing to support and work on the ancient tech that got it where it is today. The GNOME/FD.o paradigm is like Mao's continuous revolution. Out with the old and in with the new, forever and always, on an ongoing basis. Microsoft is now changing to this model. I suspect it's for similar pragmatic reasons: it's difficult to recruit young and relatively inexperienced programmers if you're just going to put them to work fixing up code bases from the 90s (written in—brotha, eugh!—C and C++). Since we can't get anybody to maintain that old code, it will become a liability in the future, so we're better off throwing it out and telling our users to cope.
- JSR_FDED 11mo agoI have yet to read one single story where people are actually happy with Windows 11.
- atherton94027 11mo agoVery impressive to see Chuck Moore still going at it at the age of 87. I hope at that age I'm able to handle the minutiae of programming!
- anadem 11mo agoTotally! At 87 that's gutsy! My very first paid programming work was in Forth on a 6502 platform in the '60s, building a networked accounting and flow management program for a water company, but I'm now 81 and very glad to be retired.
- tombert 11mo agoMy dad is in his mid 60's, and I'm pretty convinced he's going to be like that. He's not a software engineer, mostly a mechanical engineer, but it's pretty rare that I talk to him and he's not hacking on something mechanical. I'm not talking just woodshop stuff; he is actually doing math and calculations for little things that he's building. He is an engineer by blood that happened to make a career out of it.
- cess11 11mo agoSeems like a legend might be leaving the craft due to MICROS~1.
- casey2 11mo ago[flagged]
- apricot 11mo agoWhat an abject thing to say.
- 7thaccount 11mo agoIt is sad to see. I understand where he is coming from though. He is 87 and doesn't think recoding a super niche' software tool is the best use of what very well may be his last few years of life. He still seems super sharp though and is a major inspiration.
- beachy 11mo agoWhat would be the best use of his last few years? Sitting in an easy chair by the pool? Using your last few years to exercise your brain and ward off cognitive decline might be the best way to ensure those last few years are fulfilling and not just marking time before the end.
- anyfoo 11mo agoThat's quite a dichotomy here. He can exercise his brain and ward off cognitive decline without working on Colorforth specifically...
- beachy 11mo agoSome people have trouble doing meaningless intellectual pursuits like crosswords, sudoku etc. Working on Colorforth might be the greatest meaning in his life.
- 7thaccount 11mo agoHe himself said he didn't think it was worth it anymore and that he very rarely codes now. I respect him enough to assume he has some other pursuit more worthy of his attention.
- kragen 11mo agoMaybe he's been suffering a cognitive decline that makes coding much less rewarding.
- anyfoo 11mo ago
- nostrademons 11mo agoI wonder sometimes if there's an earlier level of technology that society could basically "checkpoint" at and freeze, and then build off of. Capitalism today feels like it's hit the Red Queen Paradox - it goes around and around to keep the money flowing, but with very little actual progress. Indeed, most people seem to feel like the world is getting worse for all that work, and that many of the innovations of the last ~10-15 years are "fixing" things that weren't problems to begin with while creating new problems. And yet because all the substrate is shifting around, even if you don't break something someone else will. Could we go back to a world of redundant interchangeable parts where if somebody breaks something, you just cut them off and use a substitute that works just as well? Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
- saulpw 11mo agoWhat level of computing would you checkpoint at? https://saul.pw/mag/computer/ https://saul.pw/mag/computer/
- nostrademons 11mo agoUsing your scale? ↑7 or ↑8. That seemed to be the sweet spot in capabilities to me, without getting to the point where engagement eats everything else including productivity and future maintenance. Using semiconductor process nodes? 45-65nm. That was around the point that Moore's Law broke down. At that point, you could do most of the functionality that we depend upon computers for (eg. GUIs, 3D rendering, networking, basic machine-learning, some speech recognition and text synthesis). It also roughly corresponds to ↑7 or ↑8 on your scale, so it's self-consistent. Conceptually? I'd like to have multiple checkpoints, so that if the ecosystem gets borked you can roll back further.
- saulpw 11mo agoI agree. Enough to run Quake over LAN, not quite enough to run WoW. A lot of complexity in computing is only necessary for dealing with the internet at scale.
- fouc 11mo agoSad. Yet another victim to the inexorable march of the enshittification of technology in the name of "updates" and "security".
- alexshendi 11mo agoHonestly, I don't understand this. AFAIK colorForth was a standalone system for Pentium class machines. How do Windows updates come into this?
- blippage 11mo agoHow about trying to run it on ReactOS?
- pmkary 11mo agoIt hurts so much to see a the creator of such an important thing try to convince a random kid why what he did was a success.
- kragen 11mo agoWell, that's upsetting. Microsoft: not even once.
- cyrc 10mo agohttps://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/optimizations-for-windowed-games-in-windows-11-3f006843-2c7e-4ed0-9a5e-f9389e535952 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/optimizations-fo... From the website; Optimizations for windowed games improves gaming on your PC by using a new presentation model for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 games that appear in a window or in a borderless window. When these optimizations are used, games that originally use the legacy blt-model presentation can use the newer flip-model presentation instead (if the game is compatible). This results in lower frame latency and lets you use other newer gaming features; for example, Auto HDR, and variable refresh rate (for displays that support it). It is checked by default. Hope it helps.