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A comment on Show HN: PlanckForth – Bootstrapping an interpreter from handwritten 1kb binary. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: PlanckForth – Bootstrapping an interpreter from ... by vanderZwan on Monday December 06, 2021 @11:02AM (#29461352)
No, it more or less means that a language is described in (part of) the language itself. And before you ask, no, it's not quite the same as self-hosting (good question though). The latter is more associated with compilers that can take a source file and produce another compiler. The former is often more like an interpreter that provides support for part of a language, but those part are enough to define support for the rest of the language.

So in this case, the base implementation starts with support for only a subset of the Forth language, picked for being either essential or much more performant when implemented "natively" in the binary. A subset of this subset is then used to construct support for the rest of the language. This is very typical for Forth- and Lisp-like languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-circular_evaluator

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(compilers)

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Re:Show HN: PlanckForth – Bootstrapping an interpreter from ... by qgc on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @05:38AM (#29483173)
It would be more accurate to describe a metacompiler as a cross compiler to the machine an interpreted Forth is implemented on.

I recommend Moving Forth [1] for the full explanation. (That's the part that addresses metacompliers, the rest is still quite a great book.)

[1] https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving4.htm

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