If you love HP-RPN calculators, you may love Forth as well.
Forth is a very interesting language, I find it a bit too complex for my little brain but give it a spin if, you have 2 free hours
That’s because Gforth is a threaded-code VM that saves dictionary images rather than compiling to native code.
As you prolly know, Forth blurs compile time and run time in general, and there’s no so-called clean compile, then link boundary like in C.
SwiftForth, VFX Forth, and iForth do emit real executables, and there are smaller native-code Forths for Linux too, but then the opportunity cost is losing Gforth’s portability and its standards-heavy library ecosystem.
Some sorely needed context:
> [Gforth is] a free, fast, featureful and portable implementation of the Forth 2012 language.
> Gforth runs under GNU, BSD, and similar systems, MS Windows and MacOS X and should not be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC.
If you love HP-RPN calculators, you may love Forth as well. Forth is a very interesting language, I find it a bit too complex for my little brain but give it a spin if, you have 2 free hours
Nice to see gforth is still being maintained.
BTW, on the other side, looks like gforth still lacks the ability to create native OS executable, something like:
gcc myprog.c -o myprog
?
You may enjoy ccforth then which is a mostly gforth compatible compiler which compiles to native via C.
https://github.com/ncw/ccforth
I wrote it as an experiment in having both a forth interpreter and compiler running at the same time.
That’s because Gforth is a threaded-code VM that saves dictionary images rather than compiling to native code.
As you prolly know, Forth blurs compile time and run time in general, and there’s no so-called clean compile, then link boundary like in C.
SwiftForth, VFX Forth, and iForth do emit real executables, and there are smaller native-code Forths for Linux too, but then the opportunity cost is losing Gforth’s portability and its standards-heavy library ecosystem.
and here is the tutorial: https://net2o.de/gforth/Tutorial.html