One of the most interesting Forth projects to me currently is Dusk OS, a 32-bit operating system written in Forth that includes its own C compiler, with various porting efforts under way
I cannot speak to DuskOS, I don’t know anything about it.
While historically Forth has been “its own OS”, it’s a kind of crummy one. Especially for anything a modern reader might think of when they think of an OS.
I mean, for sure, what do you want from something that can run in 8K of RAM. But while it offers primitives, historically it doesn’t of any concept of things like drivers or most any other abstractions. Code is loaded from source code (which is slow). Linking is just loading blocks in the right order. Loading a new program you must first remove the current one.
Arguably not much better than CP/M, which routinely cold started the machine to exit a program, but at least it separated the BIOS from the BDOS.
I missed this one. Thanks for the link. I was just reading "Beyond the Collapse" and my Lisp and APL/J and C skills would not allow me to approach Forth's simplicity at the OS level. I'll definitely check this out by next weekend.
While historically Forth has been “its own OS”, it’s a kind of crummy one. Especially for anything a modern reader might think of when they think of an OS.
I mean, for sure, what do you want from something that can run in 8K of RAM. But while it offers primitives, historically it doesn’t of any concept of things like drivers or most any other abstractions. Code is loaded from source code (which is slow). Linking is just loading blocks in the right order. Loading a new program you must first remove the current one.
Arguably not much better than CP/M, which routinely cold started the machine to exit a program, but at least it separated the BIOS from the BDOS.