Collapse OS – Why Forth?
collapseos.org
Collapse OS – Why Forth?
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#2It'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.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#3I'm delighted to see that hsoft took suggestions about Forth to heart, and that it has lead to both simplification and enrichment of the project.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#4Is the focus on forth to rapidly bootstrap from more than just z80, or for readability, or for some other concern?
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#5I 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
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#6Nice. Must revisit my own Forth OS, or maybe just start contributing to this.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#7It'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.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#8Is the focus on forth to rapidly bootstrap from more than just z80, or for readability, or for some other concern?
Not the developer, just a forth enthusiast. But I'd imagine it's the ability to rapidly bootstrap on other architectures. Readability is just a bonus on top of that.
The focus of CollapseOS is, well, an OS that can be used after society has collapsed, something running on scavenged chips on hand-soldered boards (in the worst case scenario).
The original logic was the Z80 is still pretty prevalent, so it was thought to be a good choice to base the OS on.
Turns out that a Forth interpreter/compiler is incredibly easy to write (just a few hundred bytes of a assembler, a few thousand at the upper end), so by using Forth they hugely expand the range of scavengeable chips.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#9First time i hear about this project and i love it.
I often talk with a friend who's an historian, and that makes me realize how our relationship with time, as an industry, is extremely short sighted.
The internet archive is an immensely valuable project, as well as all the websites archiving old documentation, etc. But i don't think a lot of people realize the value of things they're destroying everytime they execute a delete statement in a DB or a filesystem.
This Collapse OS ambition to be able to "bootstrap" something useful over any kind of primitive hardware and sustain the passage of time ( or catastrophic event) may have an immense value in the future.
Re: Collapse OS – Why Forth?
#10See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 from last year.