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The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary

(chipwits.com)
210 points JoeDaDude | 6 comments | 21 Nov 24 18:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.427s | source | bottom
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tombert ◴[21 Nov 24 19:37 UTC] No.42207795[source]▶
Forth has been something I've wanted to learn for years now. It seems weird to me that for most stuff in old computers, you have the option of "assembly" if you want your program to be fast, and "BASIC" if you want your program to be slow, but Forth lingers along as the "medium speed" language, despite at least looking pretty high-level.
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1. zabzonk ◴[21 Nov 24 20:02 UTC] No.42208026[source]▶
Very fast (faster than naive assembler) but not at all high-level; having to look after the stack is a bit of a pain. Writing your own FORTH is fun - it doesn't need to be in assembler - I once wrote a FORTH-like scripting language in C++.
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2. codesnik ◴[21 Nov 24 20:08 UTC] No.42208089[source]▶
but it's also very extendable. It's ability to slap on new control structures and DSL's is on par with Lisp. I'd say it's very low level and much higher level than the most languages simultaneously.
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3. tombert ◴[21 Nov 24 20:09 UTC] No.42208105[source]▶
Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at. It looks like it starts low level, but it seems like it allows effectively an infinite amount of abstraction.
4. zabzonk ◴[21 Nov 24 20:22 UTC] No.42208227[source]▶
yes, that's what i did on the C++ implementation i mentioned. it was for writing the action parts (not the parser etc.) for a text adventure system.
5. Someone ◴[22 Nov 24 09:54 UTC] No.42212501[source]▶
> Very fast (faster than naive assembler)

Depends on how naive the assembler programmer is, and, I would think rarely, if ever, on modern hardware because the many subroutine calls kill branch prediction benefits. Also, on lots of old 8-bit hardware, defaulting to 16-bit integers will kill performance relative to native assembly in cases where 8-bit integers suffice.

(Of course, you can fairly easily replace hot loops by assembly or (more difficult) change the forth compiler to compile parts to native code, fuse words, etc)

6. MaxBarraclough ◴[22 Nov 24 17:20 UTC] No.42215623[source]▶
> Very fast (faster than naive assembler)

Every Forth that uses conventional threaded-code interpretation pays a considerable performance penalty, execution times are likely to be very roughly quadruple the equivalent assembly. [0]

Forth's runtime performance can be competitive with C if 'proper' compilation is performed, though. [1]

[0] https://benhoyt.com/writings/count-words/

[1] (.fth file with their results in comments) http://www.mpeforth.com/arena/benchmrk.fth