Forth, a stack-based programming language, was developed within the late Nineteen Sixties by Charles H. Moore. Initially designed for controlling telescopes, it quickly discovered its place in embedded techniques and different purposes the place effectivity and compactness had been essential. Moore sought to create a easy but highly effective language that might be simply ported throughout completely different platforms, making it extremely appropriate for low-level programming duties. One among Forth’s distinctive options is its reverse Polish notation, whereby operations are expressed in a postfix type, making it extremely appropriate for stack manipulation.
The language gained traction within the Seventies, discovering favor amongst hobbyists and professionals alike resulting from its effectivity and portability. Its minimalistic design, with a small set of core phrases, facilitated the creation of domain-specific languages and the constructing of customized purposes. In consequence, Forth was utilized in quite a lot of fields, equivalent to embedded techniques, real-time management, and scientific computing. Its suitability for low-level {hardware} interplay and the power to put in writing concise and environment friendly code led to its utilization in quite a few purposes, particularly within the realm of robotics and telecommunications.
Over time, Forth has maintained a distinct segment presence, appreciated by a devoted group of builders who worth its simplicity and direct entry to {hardware}. As we speak, the language is little used, however that doesn’t imply it’s with out worth. The acute flexibility and low-level entry to {hardware} supplied by Forth may make it a perfect platform for hacking away at fashionable microcontrollers, for instance.
And if that’s the type of factor that you’re into, then a latest undertaking by GitHub consumer fuzzballcat known as milliForth could also be of curiosity to you. milliForth is an implementation of Forth that consumes solely 380 bytes of storage. That makes it sufficiently small to run this highly effective, if odd to the fashionable developer, language on the tiniest of {hardware} platforms.
Written in about 250 traces of x86 meeting language, milliForth was designed to be similar to the 512-byte sectorFORTH implementation. The modifications that scale back the scale don’t essentially make it extra usable — error dealing with was made very sparse, for instance — however they do make milliForth the smallest “actual” programming language implementation ever, in line with fuzzballcat.
The GitHub repository gives a quick overview of the phrases which are out there to be used on this implementation. There may be additionally a information that describes how one can get milliForth up and working through QEMU, and a “Howdy, World!” program is on the market to check issues out rapidly for these that aren’t aware of Forth but. All the supply code, and an assembled binary, is on the market for obtain underneath a permissive license.
Whether or not you need to add a brand new hacking device to your repertoire, or simply poke round and have some retro-inspired enjoyable, milliForth is value trying out.
