PlanckForth
I had shared some discoveries I had made in Forth territory. Since these systems of minimal abstraction really fascinate me, I took a deep dive into the PlanckForth implementation and dissected the 1 kB ELF binary down to the last byte.
This is indeed a tiny Forth interpreter that does just the most basic things in machine code. It provides the foundation for a very consequential bootstrap to be executed on top of it. The bootstrap builds the actual Forth language from first principles in several waves.
In case you’re interested, here are the binary source and bootstrap with my comments. Note that I stopped commenting in the bootstrap once it gets to the point where the minimal Forth supports line comments.
What next? Part of me wants to build a handwritten RISC-V binary for the basic interpreter ...
Tags: the-nerdy-bit, hacking