Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth

From	David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@gmx.de>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.forth
Subject	Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth
Date	2012-02-06 23:07 +0100
Message-ID	<87fwen62fr.fsf@snail.Pool> (permalink)

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Hi,

I've been having a look at Gforth-EC lately, that's the embedded
cross-compiled Forth support that has been included with Gforth all the
time, but as it's well hidden and pretty undocumented, I guess most
people wouldn't have noticed it.

Now it turns out it only takes a few commands to generate a usable 8086
gforth-ec executable, running in dosbox (i.e. emulated under Linux):

From the Gforth source directory, run:

./build-ec 8086
mv kernl-8086.fi gforthec.com  # need to rename for dosbox to execute it
dosbox gforthec.com

And voila, it prints the standard Gforth welcome message.  Some testing:

here .  14334 ok
unused u.  47162 ok
words 
[..] 
dup lit branch >r r> c! c@ (emit) (key) lastkey and xor + rp!
rp@ sp! sp@ ! @ ?branch execute ;s  ok     

More Forth-code to cross-compile can be added in arch/8086/prims.fs.  

Now 8086 code isn't really very interesting to most modern computer
users, but 8086 isn't the only architecture supported by gforth-ec.  I
can successfully run build-ec for 8086, r8c and misc.  Other targets
that seem to have been supported at some time are m68k, shboom, 6502,
c165 and 4stack, but with current Gforth-CVS compilation fails for
those.

Adding support for new target is not too difficult.  Currently I'm
trying to make it work for the LatticeMico32 CPU (the Milkymist SoC).

cheers,

David
-- 
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Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@gmx.de> - 2012-02-06 23:07 +0100
  Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth Albert van der Horst <albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> - 2012-02-07 16:07 +0000
    Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth BruceMcF <agila61@netscape.net> - 2012-02-07 07:51 -0800
    Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@gmx.de> - 2012-02-07 16:55 +0100
  Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth Coos Haak <chforth@hccnet.nl> - 2012-02-08 01:30 +0100
    Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@gmx.de> - 2012-02-08 09:52 +0100
    Re: Gforth-EC, the underappreciated embedded Forth David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@gmx.de> - 2012-02-10 01:45 +0100

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