Compiling a Forth
6 hours ago
- #Forth
- #Virtual Machine
- #Compiler
- The author built a bytecode compiler and VM for a Forth-like language to understand how Forth works.
- Forth is a stack-oriented language with two built-in stacks: the data stack and the return stack.
- The article explains basic Forth operations like pushing numbers to the stack and printing them.
- It covers more advanced features like word declarations (functions), DO/LOOP constructs, and variables.
- The tokenization process converts source code into meaningful symbols, handling comments, whitespace, and identifiers.
- Bytecode generation directly converts tokens into VM operations without building an abstract syntax tree.
- The VM manages instruction execution, data stack, return stack, and variable table.
- Visualizations and interactive components were added to demonstrate the compilation and execution process.
- The implementation differs from real Forth in several ways, including ahead-of-time compilation and static variables.
- The author created a Prism plugin for syntax highlighting Forth code snippets in the article.