41–50 of 172 posts
It'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.
Perhaps Forth has changed less than C in that time. The C of 48 years ago can look quite different from modern C.
It'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.
I hate this headline but the project is very cool. People like me who were ignorant should start here instead of the Github to get a better sense of the design goals (and why they are using Forth): https://collapseos.org/forth.html
C has excellent portability and performance. The article agrees with the general consensus that C is also generally a better language for the programmer. So why use FORTH? What does it matter that it can do cute things with self-hosting? What does 'compactness' matter?
If the goal is to build a portable means of writing programs for Z80 and AVR, why not develop a C-like language, or an IR, or put work into developing a serious optimising C compiler targeting the Z80? I get the impression that's a relatively unexplored area for (rather niche) compiler research.
Forth 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?
This is how I learned.
https://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”.
Forth written "flat" with shallow data stack usage is assembly by another name, a wrapper for load-and-store; Forth that does everything with intricate stack manipulation is a source of endless puzzles since it quickly goes write-only.
But, like any good language with meta expression capabilities, you can work your way up towards complex constructs in Forth, and write words that enforce whatever conceptual boundaries are needed and thus check your work and use the system as a compiler. That's what breaks Forth away from being a simple macro-assembler. But you have to write it in that direction, and design the system that makes sense for the task from the very beginning. That falls into an unacceptable trade-off really easily in our current world, where the majority of developers are relatively inexperienced consumers of innumerable dependencies.
I 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.
I 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…
Think about seat belts. Do you ask the driver:
> "I'm really curious to hear why you think you'll crash the car?"
when s/he puts on the seat belt? S/he'd likely say "No I don't think that at all".
And not impossible that the Collapse OS author might have a similar reply. Still, the project can be well spent time, like, a seat belt in case of the unexpected.
Think about: 1) Likelihood-of-Global-Supply-Chain-Collapse x How-Bad. And 2) How-much-does-Collapse-OS-mitigate-the-bad-things. And compare that, with 3) time spent building C.OS.