I just came across Charles Childer's new experiments with RetroForth. I lost track of RetroForth years ago, and it's great that it's going strong. The new dialects seem to focus on specialized VMs that bundle several MachineForth-like 5/6-bit opcodes into a 32-bit word...

=>gemini://nga.retroforth.org/

=>gemini://ila.retroforth.org/

=>gemini://napia.retroforth.org/

Posted in: s/FORTH

🚀 stack [mod]

2023-08-08 · 9 months ago

1 Comment

🚀 stack [OP/mod] · 2023-08-12 at 20:38:

So, after the initial glee, I am kind of disappointed... The VM is dogsh*t slow. A dead loop of 1 million takes almost a second. That's like three orders of magnitude slower than native speed. My 8-bit infinite token interpreter is only one order of magnitude off.

If I don't care about speed, I may as well use a small Lisp, like PicoLisp... For all the cool innovations of retroforth, a lisp is just so much more powerful.