vulpforth

a forth with some rather odd design decisions:

• no hidden behavior
  • no special treatment of variables, requires manually retrieving values from memory, ie ' here @ instead of here
  • words that step on your toes (if/then/else, begin/until) are kept out of the core words (those are in lib)
  • no doer/does>
• takes inspiration from:
  • miniforth (dtc using lods, dedicating a register to the value at the top of the working stack)
  • duskos (not following ans forth, outputting hex numbers)
  • someone cool on irc who enjoys being anonymous (the fancy technique to check for many bytes at once via multiplication and a bitmask)
• not an operating system
  • i like being able to run other applications
  • targets x86 linux
• no words for messing with the return stack
  • it is more dangerous than useful in my opinion
  • needlessly avoiding global variables is bad, actually
• operates on words, not lines
  • no line length limit, but can cause weird behavior
  • mostly because it was simpler to implement, i might change my mind about this one
• being fast is not a goal
  • it is decently fast because modern computers are fast, but will choose the simple/small/slow way over a faster but more complex way

building

after installing nasm, build with

make vulpforth

or the (comparatively gigantic due to needing c) zipapp debug binary with

git submodule update --init # if you have not already
make vulpforth.zip

note that zip includes modification times. if you care about reproducible builds, run files.zip through something like strip-nondeterminism. if you wish to squeeze out a smaller binary, use musl libc and sstrip vulpforthzip. both of these should be done before vulpforthzip and files.zip get concatenated into vulpforth.zip. these steps are automatically done by the included flake's zip output.