Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI

Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by kragen on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @10:10AM (#45656030)

One of the most useful ways to use Forth is as a command-line shell for scripting assembly-language primitives on a small computer, like, 64KiB of RAM or less. (Ilo has 64KiB of RAM, IIRC.)

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Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by crc_ on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @03:52PM (#45660826)

64kW of RAM @ a 4 byte (32-bit) word size, so 256KiB of actual RAM for the applications running on ilo.

For a reference, the 8088 build needs a bit more than that to account for stacks, the VM code, drivers, and memory needed for the actual hardware. (Around 384KiB physical RAM on an 8088/8086 works well from my testing, but I've tested with 285-320KiB in non-standard configurations under a few emulation targets).

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Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by kragen on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @04:52PM (#45661548)

Sorry! I appreciate the correction. I forgot that it was word-oriented.

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