As it happens, tekknolagi and I have actually been trying to read StoneKnifeForth for a couple of weeks (though it's been slow going because I became a father in that time). That quickly got us into learning about ELF, because the binaries generated by StoneKnifeForth only seem to run as `sudo` for some reason. As a regular user they die with SIGKILL while being loaded.
The link to the ELF visualization (http://i.imgur.com/xMyblyM.png) at https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page is very useful. Thanks!
Re:Coding Machines
by abecedarius on Monday August 14, 2017 @01:32PM
(#15010574)
Hi Kartik! Yeah, my un-interest in ELF is part of why I haven't really read that code.
My favorite things about Ur-Scheme are that the code is clean, as you say, and he wrote up the lessons learned at some length. No files: I think he meant not yet implementing primitives like open-input-file. Macros you can get by without: I used to use an R4RS Scheme system of my own without them, except sometimes I'd call on a dumb defmacro expander as a preprocessor.
Kragen also wrote https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth which I haven't read as much of.
FWIW I also wrote this about a sort of self-hosting Python in Python: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/seven/dragon-taming-wit... -- as a bytecode compiler it's not too big but it depends on the giant Python runtime.