Charles Childers @crc@mastodon.social
Programmer. Developer of Retro Forth, Gopher servers and clients, and several iOS apps. Co-founder DC Comtech.
Joined Sep 2017
Charles Childers
boosted
Today is my birthday. 
...
My cats don't give a shit. 
https://github.com/aniou/retro816 is an assembly version of Nga (my virtual machine) which lets one use #Retro #Forth on a 65c816 system.
Done for the night. I've migrated the biggest sets of files today:
- 1.1gb of files (served via gopher & http)
- 224mb of fossil repositories
- 7.2gb of sql (for contrition, my gopher search data; this took most of the last hour ad a half to copy over)
- 97mb of active Forth source projects
Tomorrow I'll do the remaining set, then make sure everything is working correctly on the new server before updating the DNS to point to it.
Working on migrating my main server to a new one (as I update to the latest production release of FreeBSD); this is going much slower than I'd like. I'll probably stop for the night once the current copy operation is finished and resume work on this tomorrow evening.
Charles Childers
boosted
Remember when clicking a link on the web would point your browser to the addressed resource, and network throughput permitting, it'd just ... fucking load?
None of this inline spinner while you wait for your faux animated GIF cum multi-megabyte, proprietary video file bullshit.
Charles Childers
boosted
I have to admit, the relatively rapid increase in personal projects using Forth or Scheme, especially as the core operating system for some platform, gives me hope for humanity.
The morning was beautiful. Still, quiet, a fresh layer of snow from the night covering everything.
But now I'm at work, with the other couple of people who made it in. It's going to be slow, and extremely dull as, like yesterday, everything around is closed and people are just starting to dig out from two days of snowfall.
Charles Childers
boosted
Looks like I should bump up my timeline for porting retroforth to esp32 so I should probably ifdef the teensy specific bits and such.
Charles Childers
boosted
Charles Childers
boosted
just updated the retro 12 sources in my arduino project with the latest release (2021.1, announced an hour or so ago in #retro on freenode (irc), and it just built, flashed, and passed all my tests, so I guess my project structure works for my purposes.
onward to an IO handler for a filesystem as exposed by the SdFat library!
I'm happy to announce that #Retro #Forth 2021.1 is now complete. It's available at forthworks.com/retro
A full changelog is included in the source, but a summary:
- conditionals now treat non-zero as true
- the full image is smaller
- several obscure bugs were fixed
- code and test block delimiters in Unu now user definable
- refactored the assembler
- refactored & expanded python implementation of Nga
- added a full python implementation of the build tools
- added a nim implementation of Nga
Charles Childers
boosted
woooo!
it's not much, but it executes code!
@crc's #retroforth #forth (barebones) on #teensy 4.1 over serial
cc @vertigo because he <3s the forth and platform hax ;)
Charles Childers
boosted
Boosts welcome.
Anyone interested in hiring a software engineer who is comfortable with low level programming, including embedded work? Now that 2021 is here, it's high time I start considering re-entering the work force.
I'm comfortable working in assembly language for several different processors, C, Python, Ruby, and C++ (in order of most recent to least recent experience).
My professional resume isn't terribly impressive in this area (who does low-level work anymore?), but I like to think that my Kestrel-3 and Kestrel-2 work shows my skills.
Let me know if you think I might be a good fit for your organization. Thank you.
Charles Childers
boosted
Charles Childers
boosted
Thanks to various expressions of interest & support, I've freshened my old ForthOS. It builds its own GDT/IDT, has a proper RTC handler, and all I/O is interrupt based (previously it was a polled system). On qemu it no longer pegs the host CPU at 100%. It's still free, open source, and so forth. Try the new image disk image (source included):
#retro #forth 2020.7 is now out.
Get it at https://forthworks.com/retro/r/RETRO12-2020.7.tar.gz or gopher://forthworks.com/9/retro/r/RETRO12-2020.7.tar.gz (add .sig and .pub to the URL if you want to check the signature)
This is a minor release, see http://forth.works/share/95e3a6e7444ee03fdf23efbe309f8061 or
gopher://forth.works/0/share/95e3a6e7444ee03fdf23efbe309f8061
As a side note, I now have a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/_crc to help support the ongoing development. As a result of this, Retro is now available for free in the iOS and Mac App Stores
covid19
Since my state now requires wearing a mask when shopping or at work, I've chosen one that seems fitting.
I just pushed a new release of my #forth system.
Source code, examples, documentation are at http://forthworks.com/retro or gopher://forthworks.com/1/retro
I've submitted a patch to the FreeBSD ports and submitted an updated iOS version to Apple for review.
Other than bug fixes, in this release I rewrote the assembler and have hand tuned assembly for a number of words in the standard library. It's smaller and faster than before.
Finished testing everything on the new OpenBSD server; everything is working now.
I'll keep probing the old one to try to figure out the cause, of the loss of networking but at least nothing was lost.
This is a case where it's nice to be running a nearly stock OS (the only extra package I need is fossil; everything else needed is either part of the OpenBSD base or written in retro forth, making it easy to setup).
I might write something to automate setup of the various cron jobs though.
Programmer. Developer of Retro Forth, Gopher servers and clients, and several iOS apps. Co-founder DC Comtech.
Joined Sep 2017
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!