[nickpsecurity]

"PowerPC, RISC-V, MIPS, SPARC, and other kinds of RISCy CPUs, however, don't fare nearly as well. These CPUs provide primitives that are far too atomic, and thus, to emulate a stack CPU, you literally need to translate each Machine Forth primitive into a sequence of RISC instructions."

More evidence that maybe we should stop using Forth for this stuff. It's a weird language we don't otherwise use that enforces a specific model that majority of architectures don't even support. A simple, imperative language with macro's and inline assembly should do just fine. Maybe time to dust-off Modula-2 or something similar. It worked on constrained, diverse hardware. Astrobe put Oberon on ARM microcontrollers and is porting it to RISC-V so I'm sure it's doable.

[kjs3]

Maybe time to dust-off Modula-2 or something similar. It worked on constrained, diverse hardware.

Ada would like to have a word with you. :-)

[nickpsecurity]

She knows she and SPARK are how the real design would be done. Just got to map it for production to something else majority are willing to work with, optimize, and maintain. ;)

[kjs3]

True, but let's not try to go a bridge to far, there. Maybe when people stop coming to me and insisting a couple of pages of notes is a "design document" and we can't document because we're too busy coding and shoving it out the door we can start the conversation about formal methods. This I've heard for 30 years, so not really holding out hope.

I just meant if you want to start the baby-steps getting folks moving in the right direction you don't have to dust off Modula-2 (which nostalgia notwithstanding is showing every bit of it's age)[1]. Ada doesn't have much dust on it and has a solid, free compiler and some pretty nifty software support (e.g. AWS). Oh, sure, the ecosystem (e.g. contemporary libraries, IDE support, tutorials) needs improvement, but that's just a matter of getting more programmers interested.

[1] I haven't looked at any of the contemporary Modula-2-ish efforts (e.g. GNU M2, M2R10, M3) recently and maybe things have changed, but they were all moribund or glacial labors of love from a single or tiny team of developers.

[nickpsecurity]

Remember the context is replacing Forth for where it's used. This is often in bootloaders with basically no storage and sometimes under 32-bits. I'm not sure how well Ada works in such situations. So, we'll need a HLL that's readable, safer, easy to compiler, and easy to produce both CISC and RISC code for. Wirth & Jurg threw Modula-2 together in a year or two for Lilith with students routinely porting his stuff to new platforms in months rather than years. So, a new Modula-2 variant seemed like an easy replacement for Forth.

"but that's just a matter of getting more programmers interested."

Won't happen: they hate Ada as much as LISP. More given Clojure is going mainstream but Ada still isn't. So, if I want to use it, I have to deliver the result in their language or build killer app that hooks them onto Ada. The first is easier to do most of the time. Adacore even acquired a company that specialized in deploying Ada apps as either C or C++. So, it's a proven model which could be applied to a simpler language (eg Modula-2) for bootloaders, etc.

[kjs3]

That's fair, and I don't, per se, disagree with any point.

That said, I will reiterate that it's clear that based on the several recent attempts, un-zombie-fying Modula-2 isn't trivial. Perhaps the answer is to grab one of these projects (or Modula-3) and throw the effort into "you're not going to be the next Webdev language, but lets beat this low-level systems niche into our world". Maybe start by writing a bulletproof bootloader or something. Or some security sensitive network plumbing. Can't do any worse than the Rust/Go guys are doing, with the bonus that Modula-[23] have actually been used to build real bare metal systems.

I dunno...maybe I just need another scotch.

FWIW...every time I've been in a "Forth could do this, but forth makes me want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, what is the alternative?" scenario, I reached for C, and haven't really been all that disappointed. I know that makes me a bad person.

[nickpsecurity]

Oh, I agree about work to revive a Modula-like language. Plus that it helps to do example projects that show why it's better. The CVSup author doing his tool in Modula made a nice, case study in Modula vs X discussions. One solution I thought of was just subsetting a language like Go or Pascal w/ runtime being limited or zero. Free Pascal still has good tool support plus was first Wirth language used in systems work. GEMSOS security kernel was also written in Pascal. You might also find BootSafe interesting: a certified compiler and checker from Java to Forth for increasing assurance/maintenance of Open Firmware components. Tool is quite proprietary but the approach could be used with Go, Pascal, etc if Forth is required.

So, there's some options on that. Far as Forth vs C, I think it's fine to think C is acceptable for firmware as being a near-cross-platform assembly suddenly helps there. I'd have made C default for this given all developers, tools, and code examples available. And then we'd have this discussion to figure out how to get rid of it.

On other hand, doing almost everything system in C then switching to Forth for just firmware? That's worse than doing everything in C. You're a better person for sparing the maintainers from that crap. ;)