Comment by DonHopkins
19 days ago
It is, actually! I didn’t realize that until I read the handwritten WASM s-expression source code of WAForth.
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://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://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zmb4eb/waforth_wasmb...
>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.
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
>Forth has not been influential, at all.
Yes, you're right.
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