> Are we consing yet?
> #'cons
#<compiled-function CONS 0x43cee0>
https://functional.cafe/@jackdaniel/114742776265318353
The work will go towards improving browser integration and porting to WASI.
That means that you may interactively use repl to call functions that were compiled ahead of time and to add new functions even on uncooperative targets.
After you've finished prototyping you may compile the finished library to native ahead of time.
Languages like Lisp or Forth that run on WASM — or even handwritten s-expression-style WASM code like in the WAForth kernel — can dynamically compile and assemble new WASM bytecode and data. They can then call back to the JavaScript host to create and link entirely new WASM modules on the fly, and immediately call into them from the current module or others. A single WASM context can juggle many dynamic modules, large and small, all generated and linked at runtime!
So you can compile new code in Forth or Lisp and immediately link and call it using indirect cross-module calls. It’s not the fastest way to call into WASM, but a metacompiler — like Mitch Bradley’s ForthMacs / OpenFirmware — could recompile the whole system into one efficient, monolithic WASM module that uses direct calls.
Here's the author's blog post about WAForth:
A Dynamic Forth Compiler for WebAssembly
https://el-tramo.be/blog/waforth/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374057
DonHopkins on Jan 13, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: What the hell is Forth? (2019)
This is a great article! I love his description of Forth as "a weird backwards lisp with no parentheses".
https://blog.information-superhighway.net/what-the-hell-is-f...
Reading the source code of "WAForth" (Forth for WebAssembly) really helped me learn about how WebAssembly works deep down, from the ground up.
It demonstrates the first step of what the article says about bootstrapping a Forth system, and it has some beautiful hand written WebAssembly code implementing the primitives and even the compiler and JavaScript interop plumbing. We discussed the possibility of developing a metacompiler in the reddit discussion.
I posted this stuff about WAForth and a link to a reddit discussion with its author in the hn discussion of "Ten influential programming languages (2020)":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34056735
Yes, I agree FORTH should be probably be on the list, at least if the list was a few languages longer, for as influential as it's been.
WAForth for WebAssembly is beautiful and modern!
https://github.com/remko/waforth
It's a lovingly crafted and hand written in well commented WebAssembly code, using Racket as a WebAssembly macro pre-processor.
I learned so much about WebAssembly by reading this and the supporting JavaScript plumbing.
The amazing thing is that the FORTH compiler dynamically compiles FORTH words into WebAssembly byte codes, and creates lots of tiny little WebAssembly modules dynamically that can call each other, by calling back to JavaScript to dynamically create and link modules, which it links together in the same memory and symbol address space on the fly! A real eye opener to me that it was possible to do that kind of stuff with dynamically generated WebAssembly code! It has many exciting and useful applications in other languages than FORTH, too.
Lots more discussion and links in the reddit article.
But here's the beef, jump right in:
https://github.com/remko/waforth/blob/master/src/waforth.wat
Reddit /r/Forth discussion of WAForth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zmb4eb/waforth_wasmb...
remko:
Author here
If you can't be bothered to install VS Code, you can have a look at a standalone version of the example notebook (in a 26kB self-contained page).
And if you're planning to go to FOSDEM 2023, come say hi: I'll be giving a talk there on WebAssembly and Forth in the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing devroom.
DonHopkins:
I really love your tour-de-force design and implementation of WAForth, and I have learned a lot about WebAssembly by reading it. Never before have I seen such beautiful meticulously hand written and commented WebAssembly code.
Especially the compiler and runtime plumbing you've implemented that dynamically assembles bytecode and creates WebAssembly modules for every FORTH word definition, by calling back to JavaScript code that pulls the binary bytecode of compiled FORTH words out of memory and creates a new module with it pointing to the same function table and memory.
WebAssembly is a well designed open standard that's taking over the world in a good way, and it also runs efficiently not just in most browsers and mobile smartphones and pads, but also on the desktop, servers, cloud edge nodes, and embedded devices. And those are perfect target environments for FORTH!
What you've done with FORTH and WebAssembly is original, brilliant, audacious, and eye-opening!
I'd read the WebAssembly spec before, and used and studied the Unity3D WebAssembly runtime and compiler to integrate Unity3D with JavaScript, and I also studied the AssemblyScript subset of TypeScript targeting WebAssembly and its runtime, and also Aaron Turner's awesome wasmboy WebAssembly GameBoy emulator .
I first saw your project a few years ago and linked to it in this Hacker News discussion about Thoughts on Forth Programming because I thought it was cool, but it's come a long way in three years, and I'm glad I finally took the time to read some of your code, which was well worth the investment of time.
Until reading your code, I didn't grasp that it was possible to integrate WebAssembly with JavaScript like that, and use it to dynamically generate code the way you have!
Also, the way you used Racket as a macro assembler for WebAssembly was a practical and beautiful solution to the difficult problem of writing maintainable WebAssembly code by hand.
Even for people not planning on using FORTH, WAForth is an enlightening and useful example for learning about WebAssembly and its runtime, and a solid proof of concept that it's possible to dynamically generate and run WebAssembly code on the fly, and integrate a whole bunch of tiny little WebAssembly modules together.
Playing with and reading through your well commented code has really helped me understand WebAssembly and TypeScript and the surface between them at a much deeper level. Thank you for implementing and sharing it, and continuing to improve it too!
remco:
Wow, thanks a lot, I really appreciate that! It makes me very happy that I was able to get someone to learn something about WebAssembly by reading the source code, which is exactly what I was going for.
[More links and discussion of WAForth, WebAssembly, and Forth Metacompilers:]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zmb4eb/waforth_wasmb...
Here's the author's blog post about WAForth: A Dynamic Forth Compiler for WebAssembly
https://el-tramo.be/blog/waforth/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374057
DonHopkins on Jan 13, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: What the hell is Forth? (2019)
This is a great article! I love his description of Forth as "a weird backwards lisp with no parentheses".
Reading the source code of "WAForth" (Forth for WebAssembly) really helped me learn about how WebAssembly works deep down, from the ground up.
It demonstrates the first step of what the article says about bootstrapping a Forth system, and it has some beautiful hand written WebAssembly code implementing the primitives and even the compiler and JavaScript interop plumbing. We discussed the possibility of developing a metacompiler in the reddit discussion.
I posted this stuff about WAForth and a link to a reddit discussion with its author in the hn discussion of "Ten influential programming languages (2020)":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34056735
Yes, I agree FORTH should be probably be on the list, at least if the list was a few languages longer, for as influential as it's been.
WAForth for WebAssembly is beautiful and modern!
https://github.com/remko/waforth
It's a lovingly crafted and hand written in well commented WebAssembly code, using Racket as a WebAssembly macro pre-processor.
I learned so much about WebAssembly by reading this and the supporting JavaScript plumbing.
The amazing thing is that the FORTH compiler dynamically compiles FORTH words into WebAssembly byte codes, and creates lots of tiny little WebAssembly modules dynamically that can call each other, by calling back to JavaScript to dynamically create and link modules, which it links together in the same memory and symbol address space on the fly! A real eye opener to me that it was possible to do that kind of stuff with dynamically generated WebAssembly code! It has many exciting and useful applications in other languages than FORTH, too.
Lots more discussion and links in the reddit article.
But here's the beef, jump right in:
https://github.com/remko/waforth/blob/master/src/waforth.wat
Reddit /r/Forth discussion of WAForth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zmb4eb/waforth_wasmb...
remko:
Author here
If you can't be bothered to install VS Code, you can have a look at a standalone version of the example notebook (in a 26kB self-contained page).
And if you're planning to go to FOSDEM 2023, come say hi: I'll be giving a talk there on WebAssembly and Forth in the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing devroom.
DonHopkins:
I really love your tour-de-force design and implementation of WAForth, and I have learned a lot about WebAssembly by reading it. Never before have I seen such beautiful meticulously hand written and commented WebAssembly code.
Especially the compiler and runtime plumbing you've implemented that dynamically assembles bytecode and creates WebAssembly modules for every FORTH word definition, by calling back to JavaScript code that pulls the binary bytecode of compiled FORTH words out of memory and creates a new module with it pointing to the same function table and memory.
WebAssembly is a well designed open standard that's taking over the world in a good way, and it also runs efficiently not just in most browsers and mobile smartphones and pads, but also on the desktop, servers, cloud edge nodes, and embedded devices. And those are perfect target environments for FORTH!
What you've done with FORTH and WebAssembly is original, brilliant, audacious, and eye-opening!
I'd read the WebAssembly spec before, and used and studied the Unity3D WebAssembly runtime and compiler to integrate Unity3D with JavaScript, and I also studied the AssemblyScript subset of TypeScript targeting WebAssembly and its runtime, and also Aaron Turner's awesome wasmboy WebAssembly GameBoy emulator .
I first saw your project a few years ago and linked to it in this Hacker News discussion about Thoughts on Forth Programming because I thought it was cool, but it's come a long way in three years, and I'm glad I finally took the time to read some of your code, which was well worth the investment of time.
Until reading your code, I didn't grasp that it was possible to integrate WebAssembly with JavaScript like that, and use it to dynamically generate code the way you have!
Also, the way you used Racket as a macro assembler for WebAssembly was a practical and beautiful solution to the difficult problem of writing maintainable WebAssembly code by hand.
Even for people not planning on using FORTH, WAForth is an enlightening and useful example for learning about WebAssembly and its runtime, and a solid proof of concept that it's possible to dynamically generate and run WebAssembly code on the fly, and integrate a whole bunch of tiny little WebAssembly modules together.
Playing with and reading through your well commented code has really helped me understand WebAssembly and TypeScript and the surface between them at a much deeper level. Thank you for implementing and sharing it, and continuing to improve it too!
remco:
Wow, thanks a lot, I really appreciate that! It makes me very happy that I was able to get someone to learn something about WebAssembly by reading the source code, which is exactly what I was going for.
[More links and discussion of WAForth, WebAssembly, and Forth Metacompilers:]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zmb4eb/waforth_wasmb...
There's an often repeated line that WebAssembly isn't really "assembly" and it's not "web". There's a lot of truth to that. I dove in hoping for a cross platform, web enabled assembly. It looks a lot like an assembly but I find it's relatively few restrictions like lack of a true jump command rippling out more than one would have expected. It's also sortuva stack machine and sortuva register machine at the same time.
It does share a lot with the internal VMs in many places like the JVM, Python's VM, .net, etc.
If you want to make mcclim progress faster then chip in with actual expertise instead of unfunded snarks.
ECL is a stable implementation with actual users, if you can point out existing problems then please report them.
if wasm interop clicks, even at shared memory level, lisp can directly drive ui updates. state changes, you eval, dom shifts. pure control flow without detour
Latest on my project, in case you want to try it out: https://deosjr.github.io/dynamicland/whiskers.html
[0]: https://webassemblyman.com/wat_webassembly_text_format.html
> Implementing Lisp onto WebAssembly is so obvious that you may wonder why somebody did not have this idea long ago.
I did find this on the Femto GitHub and got a chuckle. Yes, dear author, that is exactly the piece of information I want explained. Too funny.
The Gambit Scheme REPL that comes with a tutorial, supports threads in the browser and has a JS FFI: https://try.gambitscheme.org
Gambit in emacs in the browser: https://feeley.github.io/gambit-in-emacs-in-the-browser/
Forth has not been influential, at all. If it was your first or second encounter with computers, it might have been influential on you, which is a great thing for you, but it was not influential on the industry.
the late 70's-early 80's was the beginning of the microprocessor era. This opened the door to computers for people who would be interested in computers but had no access prior. But the "leading" people in computer science at that time were the people who did already have access to computers. This created a bifurcation between the people who were, say, pursuing lisp since 1960 because of what they had learned about lambda calculus before, and people pursuing Forth who had never heard of Lisp, but had heard of Pascal but didn't realize that UCSD Pascal was a p-code stack machine just like Forth was; if they had realized it there might have been overlap, there wasn't. Programmable HP calculators were already more advanced since the HP-65
(please don't nitpick me, if you remember that time, you know what i'm talking about.) The much revered Dr Dobbs and Byte magazine were not on the reading list of people who were at MIT or Carnegie or Stanford. If you graduated at that time (hint hint) you had this choice of working at a place like Microsoft (DOShit in the boonies) or Apple (8-bit 6502 nonsense on an OS nobody remembers) or at DEC or HP or Xerox or BBN, companies pursuing excellence based on the already-history of CS.
because microprocessor "ate the world", the early history of microprocessors seems "important": it wasn't, except for what it became
when Apple and Microsoft borrowed ideas from Xerox PARC to create MacOs and Microsoft Windows, they were borrowing from programmable microcode architectures which are still more interesting than amd64
IMHO a Common Lisp without TCO is not a serious tool because I cannot write tail-recursive code with it.
Yes, you're right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTFDS-MGFK0
The answer was, of course, number two! (cut to stock film of Women's Institute applauding) I'm afraid there's been an error in our computer. The correct answer should of course have been number four, and not Katy Boyle. Katy Boyle is not a loony, she is a television personality. (fanfare as for historical pageant; a historical-looking shield comes up on screen) And now it's time for 'Spot the Loony, historical adaptation'. (historical music) And this time it's the thrilling medieval romance 'Ivanoe'... a stirring story of love and war, violence and chivalry, set midst the pageantry and splendour of thirteenth-century England. All you have to do is, 'Spot the Loony'.
And now a word from our sponsors, Looney Labs, makers of fine card games whose rules and conditions for winning change throughout the game, including the most popular among machine learning AI enthusiasts, Python FLUXX, the first set to have the Meta Rule subtype card, which stemmed from a FLUXX Tournament rule:
https://www.looneylabs.com/games/monty-python-fluxx
>Yes, that crazy card game where the rules keep changing has joined forces with Monty Python to create the Looneyest card game ever! Help King Arthur and his Knights find the Holy Grail. Bring a Shrubbery to the Knights Who Say Ni! Lob the Holy Hand Grenade at the Killer Rabbit with Nasty Big Teeth! Just do it quick, before the Goal changes again!
Doctor Who FLUXX:
https://store.looneylabs.com/collections/fluxx-games/product...
>Doctor Who Fluxx takes Fluxx through Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Join with various regenerations of the Doctor, some companions, Gallifreyan tech, and K-9 (but beware of Cybermen, Daleks, Weeping Angels, and the Master) and play the most ever-changingest, timey-wimey version of Fluxx ever created. Doctor Who Fluxx: you'll play it time after time after time after time...
Stoner FLUX:
https://store.looneylabs.com/collections/fluxx-games/product...
>Put on some good music and line up some snacks... Stoner Fluxx is a game about toking with your friends, getting the munchies, and changing the rules.
>Our country seems to be moving closer to finally legalizing marijuana at the national level, so we have completely removed the warning messages on the cards instead of only adjusting them a bit like we have with each print run in the past.
MEET THE LOONIES:
https://store.looneylabs.com/pages/about-us
>Looney Labs was founded in 1997 by two former NASA engineers named Looney. The husband and wife team have been creating fun ever since, with Andy inventing the games, and Kristin running the company. Along with the help of four other full-time employees, several part-timers, and an army of fans, the Looneys are changing the way you play!
ABOUT FLUXX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx
>Fluxx is a card game published by Looney Labs. It is different from most other card games, in that the rules and the conditions for winning are altered throughout the game, via cards played by the players.
SL-USER> (time (loop for i below (expt 10 8) count t))
Evaluation time: 19376ms
100000000
SL-USER> (time (loop for i below 1000000 count t))
Evaluation time: 272ms
1000000
SL-USER> (defun fib (n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
#'FIB
SL-USER> (time (fib 32))
Evaluation time: 1601ms
2178309
I used to think it's quite slow, but somehow it's much faster than any other posted here. The only Lisp in browser I know to beat SLip (by a large margin) is JSCL, which compiles to JS.
But JSCL is much faster on the fib example, that's why I thought it should be generally faster. After all, it compiles to JS.
I don't know if you've been tracking it lately, but there was a big overhaul last year [1]. The version in your second link doesn't seem to work in current Firefox. If you'd like to update and need any help, please feel free to get in touch. (also, there's still some of your code in Ymacs :) although I kinda broke filename completion...)