I've been on/off working on a homebrew NES game. Pretty much the go-to environment for that is assembly, which I'm sure I could write if I were motivated, but

I've been on/off working on a homebrew NES game. Pretty much the go-to environment for that is assembly, which I'm sure I could write if I were motivated, but I find assembly considerably un-fun so I wanted to use a higher-level language. I had been looking for an excuse to learn Forth, and its use in classic computing meant that it had a shot of being workable on the NES. I was initially using IceForth but I had trouble getting that working, and so I got Codex to generate something that works, but then I also that building your own Forth is sort of a rite of passage for a software engineer, so I have been building my own Forth from scratch. My custom hack-job isn't ready yet, but I was extremely impressed at the performance I was able to get on the NES with compiled Forth from the Codex thing on the NES. I'm getting roughly 80% of the speed for equivalent programs written in assembly, with much less code and this is without advanced optimizations. I do plan on finishing my custom one because I think I can build what I want a bit better than Codex, and I'm optimistic I can get the performance reasonable. Forth is such a fascinating language, because it sort of enables you to work at any level of the program. You can write it super high level, almost like Lisp, but you can also poke around and create mappings to assembly, and you can do all this with decent performance no less! It has quickly become one of my more favorite scripting languages, though that might be because I have always had a soft spot for RPN.