
Moving Forth, Part 1: Design Decisions in the Forth Kernel (1993) - rutenspitz
http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm
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mikekchar
I've always thought that writing a threaded interpretive language (TIL) is a
good experience for every programmer. It really changes the way you think. It
is also possibly one of those things that might come back into fashion. Since
it is easy to fit a FORTH kernel in a few kilobytes, one can imagine sticking
the entire kernel into cache. Higher level functions are simply jumps to
things that are already in the cache. Along with favouring stack allocation to
heap allocation, this goes a long way to creating an environment friendly to
multi-processing.

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abecedarius
I have trouble imagining a comeback because Forth's unique value is in staking
out the tiny-and-simple end of the efficiency frontier. But Lisp is almost as
simple if you can spare more resources, while if you're OK with complexity
there are compilers that optimize better.

It'd be nice to be wrong, since I'd love to work in a system where every bit
is handcrafted and known to me. I didn't quite get there back in the 80s in my
summer job at FORTH, Inc. but it did teach me a bunch and I enjoyed scrounging
out a few bytes here and there.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Kay and his team are coming along nicely at that in their STEPS's project at
VPRI. In LISP + DSL's. :)

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desireco42
Always was fascinated by Forth. There is a trend of going back to roots, I
wouldn't mind seeing Forth finding it's place.

