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Collapse OS – Why Forth?
31–40 of 172 posts
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#32It's odd to highlight that Forth is 50 years old, considering C is 48 years old and still in very heavy use in operating systems development.
It's odd to compare C and Forth. They are so different. Edit: as someone below mentioned there can not be a 'Standard Forth'. You just write your own one as you see fit.
There's ANS Forth. Chuck Moore doesn't like it, but it exists.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#33https://collapseos.org/why.html "That being said, I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." Triple negative? Quadruple negative? (If we count the second "don't".) Compare something like: "I consider it reasonable to believe that collapse is unlikely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." It is al…
>It is almost as if the grammatical structure reflects the life perspective of the author.
That seems like a perfectly valid thing for grammatical structure to do, although this one tripped me up admittedly.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#34If this gets you interested in z80 hardware, I would recommend building an RC2014: https://rc2014.co.uk/ I built an RC2014 after CollapseOS was posted last year, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I ended up adding a front panel, complete with switches and lights, to allow toggling in and executing code without a ROM, and also wrote a HTTP/1.0 server for CP/M (which was an enormous headache for lots of different reasons). Ne…
I love this project, and check in on it every few months. I particularly like the idea of scavenging hardware: > With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools. I'd be interested in trying to build my own proof-of-concept, but my ha…
> > a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install
> trying to build
What if there was a crowdfunding project to pay different people, to actually do this?
They could find unclear things in the docs, or missing docs. Usability Testing, sort of, of Collapse OS?
This is maybe pretty important after all :- ) More important than Fly-to-Mars rockets?
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#35Forth is one of the last languages on my list. Whenever I read something like this article, I want to learn it. The advice at the end of the article seems interesting. Does anyone have any resources that might help with this?
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#36I thought this is pretty fun project and the idea is just cool right away, but then I went on reading and was surprised by the fact it seems the author is serious. I would be really curious to hear his opinion on why the supply chains should collapse before 2030. Obviously, there wouldn't be a shortage of people in the comments who can start speculating on why it might happen, and, of course, I myself also can provid…
If you had told me last year that we would have a pandemic, lockdown, massive economic recession and job loss and now riots and protests etc and all at the same time I probably wouldn't have believed it. I'm starting to think the world is a lot more fragile than we all thought.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#37this might be a dumb question but can someone briefly explain why Forth is more suitable over C or other languages in general on post-apocalyptic OS?
- It's tiny and dead simple to implement
- It sits very close to assembly
- It allows high-level programming like in C
- The concept of pushing/popping things onto/off the stack is a relatively straightforward programming model when done consistently
One of the old competitors to the likes of UEFI and uBoot is OpenFirmware (also known as OpenBoot), for which the primary UI is a Forth shell; OpenFirmware was the BIOS equivalent for Sun's SPARC workstations/servers (and still is for Oracle's/Fujistu's SPARC servers, last I checked) and most POWER hardware (including "New World" PowerPC Macs), among others. About the most delightful pre-boot environment I've used; it's a shame it didn't catch on in the x86 or ARM space.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#38I love this project. Thank you for posting it. The idea of a post collapse operating system reminds me of slackware/subgenius’s old slogan: “...the world ends tomorrow and you may die!” I’ll be trying to compile collapseos, write forth and load slackware on floppys in a few years then. (Will systemd survive civilisation’s collapse, especially when it caused it, that is the question....)
For me this is slightly into Poe's Law territory: Is this actual prepper mindset, or tongue-in-cheek?
Thanks. I'd never heard of that law before. I think he's serious. I'll appreciate his work both pre and pos civilisation collapse. I like his software aesthetic too.
Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm seeking more control, maybe the world has come needlessly complex, but there's a certain appeal about returning to more manageable days, where it was possible to fit a software and hardware system in your brain, and your brain was swimming with ideas on how to use a limited system rather than drowning in layers of complexity.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#39> Some Forth enthusiasts like the language for itself. They think that its easier to express much of the logic of a program in this language. Many books and tutorials are touting this. [...] That's not my opinion.
In my opinion, it's not that FORTH code is hard to read, but that FORTH gives the programmer so much freedom that every program becomes its own microcosm of DSLs.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#40https://collapseos.org/why.html "That being said, I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." Triple negative? Quadruple negative? (If we count the second "don't".) Compare something like: "I consider it reasonable to believe that collapse is unlikely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." It is al…
There's a difference between “not unreasonable” and “reasonable”.