Sectorforth: A 16-bit x86 Forth that fits in a boot sector

Re:Sectorforth: A 16-bit x86 Forth that fits in a boot sector by breckinloggins on Sunday September 27, 2020 @07:56PM (#24611314)

I tried to do something “interesting” with my own little lisp based on the “Maxwell’s Equations of Software” paper. I don’t know if I succeeded exactly (and like most such projects I left it in a somewhat unfinished state), but I did achieve the same “now we’ve defined comments!” kind of mystical experience as the author of the linked article.

Have fun! https://github.com/breckinloggins/vau

(Check out the prelude for satisfying doses of meta)

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Re:Sectorforth: A 16-bit x86 Forth that fits in a boot sector by RodgerTheGreat on Sunday September 27, 2020 @09:07PM (#24611819)

It's a very different kind of simplicity and self-hosting. Vau uses rich features of a managed programming language in order to achieve lispiness.

The true beauty of something like SectorForth is its mechanical empathy. It relies only on the machine code of the system, and while it has quirks and shortcomings to fit in 512 bytes, it has everything you would need to bootstrap into a fully-productive Forth.

Of course, if Oscar Toledo feels inclined to step in and furnish a 512 byte extensible Lisp that runs on an 8080, I won't be upset.

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Re:Sectorforth: A 16-bit x86 Forth that fits in a boot sector by breckinloggins on Sunday September 27, 2020 @09:48PM (#24612120)

Yep. I was definitely cheating, and it’s more like “syntactical self hosting”. I’ve wanted to try my hand at a Forth like this but so far I haven’t started anything.

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