Charles Childers @crc@mastodon.social

Working on documentation for #retro #forth. Current state: gopher://forth.works:70/1/handbook or http://forth.works/book.html . Any feedback would me appreciated.

I should be able to wrap up an update to my ios gopher client this weekend. (I found a few small issues in the latest tests, mostly involving working around the notched display on newer devices. The other bug fixes and support for saving text and images to Files are done).

After 12 years, I'm getting back into OS development with #Retro #Forth.

Using my standard VM and image, with a few new words to allow access to physical RAM and I/O ports, I now have a functional system with text display, serial, cmos rtc, & ATA drivers in Forth. The keyboard driver is in assembly, the MISC VM is in C. Boots to the listener, also has a block editor.

It's now as functional as the last x86-assembly version (Retro9, 2007), but with most things actually in Forth this time.

Retro #Forth 2019.1 is now released.

Source:
https://forthworks.com/retro/r/RETRO12-2019.1.tar.gz
gopher://forthworks.com/9/retro/r/RETRO12-2019.1.tar.gz

Binaries are not updated yet. I'll be working on this over the weekend.

Release Notes:
https://forthworks.com/share/d844330507a28bd23be8758ea4855b7a
gopher://forthworks.com/0/share/d844330507a28bd23be8758ea4855b7a

This has numerous small improvements and additions. Of some note: the binaries have been renamed to avoid conflicts with other projects and the internal I/O handling is cleaner and more modular.

#gopher question: is there a commonly used port for gopher+tls?

Looking forward to a couple of shorter work weeks. I'll hopefully be able to get some much needed rest.

In other news, I have obtained an old Kindle Fire, managed to get the Google Play bits, something other than Amazon's clumsy launcher running on it, and a copy of Android Studio on the MacBook, so I can finally get to work on porting/rewriting a few things for Android in 2019.

I finally got around to making some small improvements to my gopher & http servers, reducing memory footprint considerably (it no longer slurps the entire file to memory before sending). This should help a bit with some recent server load problems. #forth #gopher

I'm going to wrap up my current small update to my #gopher client tonight. Pushing the bigger changes to 2019 as I'm not going to have enough time before the end of the year to complete them.

I really need to find time to finish up my current projects. Late days at work (setting up a new security system and network in the evenings) and an ongoing lack of sleep have really killed my productivity. Hoping 2019 will be better...

I've written a #Forth implementation of the assembler I use for my virtual machine, so I can now build a new base image from within Retro. This gets me much closer to being able to self host all but the VM.

Enjoying a quiet morning. It's a little cold (sadly I find myself noticing the cold more each year), but otherwise it's quite nice outside.

I've finally had an opportunity to get my MacBook updated, so I'm now running the latest Xcode again. Also setup Android Studio, so I can finally start learning to do Android development.

Progress on app updates and new projects will still be slow as I'm still having a lot of RSI issues. I have a long list of ideas and todos, but it's hard to get anything done when I can only work for an hour or so before the pain returns.

I've spent the last week of evenings working an a variant of #retro #forth for writing games with one of my sons. It's been an interesting divergence from my normal programming.

I'm finally starting to dig back into my projects. My RSI issues aren't resolved yet, but I'm at least not in pain now.

First up, a small update to my #iOS #gopher client to improve the display of non-standard item types in menus. This is out now at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gopher-client/id1235310088?mt=8 Hopefully I'll be able to do considerably more work on this soon; I've been experimenting with some user interface stuff and looking into allowing file downloads and more viewers.

I'm looking forward to the ride home tonight. The humidity has (finally) broken and it'll be ~10 degrees cooler than the last few weeks.