SwiftForth IDE for Windows, Linux, macOS

(forth.com)

32 points | by tosh 4 days ago ago

10 comments

  • ctmnt 3 hours ago

    Object-oriented Forth? Far out.

    There’s surprising stuff on every page of this site. On the Contact Us page:

    > If you’re looking for the debt relief company […]

    The Featured Forth Applications page [1] answered a lot of my questions.

    1: https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-apps/

    • astrobe_ 2 hours ago

      > Object-oriented Forth? Far out.

      The cost is stupidly high, though. Look at the source code of [1].

      The only good page to take from OOP book is the automatic and implicit pseudo-variable "self" or "this", that can reduce stack juggling significantly. I've implemented that in my (yet to be published) dialect and it works like a charm. In my experience, you can have that for cheap and anything more is not worth it from the point of view of a byte-counting Forth programmer.

      [1] https://vfxforth.com/flag/swoop/index.html

  • JimRoepcke 5 hours ago

    x86 only on Mac is one of the decisions of all time.

  • pjmlp 4 hours ago

    Me thinking this was a Forth IDE implementated in Swift UI.

  • desireco42 7 hours ago

    So we had quite a deluge of Forth options recently :), not that I am complaining. As someone who doesn't use Forth much, which one is used the most?

    This one for example looks like well rounded and user friendly option.

    Would anyone care to comment about this?

    • astrobe_ 2 hours ago

      This is made by the company the inventor of the language created. Then he left it because Forth, inc. needed the language to be standardized, which wasn't his idea of Forth and, his point of view is that he solved the software problems and what was left was solving the hardware problems, so he moved to working on stack-based processors.

      Swift Forth is literally a professional Forth and is well regarded. The other often recommend Forth is the FOSS GForth. They are good for starting because they are popular and standard, so you'll find help easily.

      Other "smaller" Forth are often non-standard dialects and are more-or-less mature experiments.

    • nickcw 2 hours ago

      Gforth is free and well rounded so I'd recommend that if you want to experiment with Forth. It is not very fast though, SwiftForth with optimised subroutine threading will be a lot faster. I haven't tried SwiftForth though as you have to pay for it and it is x86 only.

    • tosh an hour ago

      gForth [0] is great for getting started

      if you are working with specific hardware (e.g. microcontrollers) it depends on which forth dialects are available but for the raspberry pico and pico 2 I recently found zeptoforth [1]

      or you know you can always bootstrap your own :)

      [0] https://gforth.org [1] https://github.com/tabemann/zeptoforth

  • pdntspa 6 hours ago

    And here I thought this was some sort of cross-platform Swift-Forth hybrid