Forthlike
My curiosity about Forth got the best of me this week. While I probably should have been working on my event-sourced cross-posting tool in my spare time, I instead spent it building another programming language. Sort of.
I've built a few small games using LÖVE, a cross-platform framework that hides much of the complexity of game development behind a clean Lua API.
I don’t hate Lua, but it’s far from my favourite programming language. I have a partially implemented ML-style language that compiles to Lua. In the interest of starting more projects that I won’t finish, I began working on another compiler/interpreter. (Partially implementing things and abandoning them is the main purpose of the meetup I run.)
In this case, it’s an attempt to build something like LÖVE, but instead of being written in C++ and controlled from Lua, it’s written in Zig and controlled from Forth. (There will be no AI-driven Rust rewrite.)
This raises the question: who wants that? I dunno. Probably no one. Maybe not even me, but it’s fun to work on. I was mostly using it as an excuse to get more familiar with Zig, but I didn’t actually want to write a game in Zig. To be fair, I’m not sure I really want to make a game in Forth either. 🤷🏻♂️
It’s been a fun experience, though. I think the most wonderful thing about Forth, and in particular the more minimal dialects, is how few built-in words you need to make the language usable. milliForth has only 11 words and is only 336 bytes. I’m not aiming for minimalism, but I love seeing how a fully functional system can be built up from a small set of primitives.
Usually I recommend recent releases, but today I’m stepping back a couple of years to recommend a record by my friend Sol's band.
Burnt Lung is a stoner sludge/doom band from Vancouver, BC. That genre is near and dear to my heart. I love listening to it while working. Something about slow, heavy riffs keeps me in the zone. Burnt Lung takes the formula and brings an energy and visceral rage that matches the subject matter of their lyrics. Give it a spin.
