[HN Gopher] Collapse OS - Why Forth?
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Collapse OS - Why Forth?
Author : crousto
Score : 94 points
Date : 2020-06-07 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (collapseos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (collapseos.org)
| bsaul wrote:
| First time i hear about this project and i love it.
|
| I often talk with a friend who's an historian, and that makes me
| realize how our relationship with time, as an industry, is
| extremely short sighted.
|
| The internet archive is an immensely valuable project, as well as
| all the websites archiving old documentation, etc. But i don't
| think a lot of people realize the value of things they're
| destroying everytime they execute a delete statement in a DB or a
| filesystem.
|
| This Collapse OS ambition to be able to "bootstrap" something
| useful over any kind of primitive hardware and sustain the
| passage of time ( or catastrophic event) may have an immense
| value in the future.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Forth is one of the last languages on my list. Whenever I read
| something like this article, I want to learn it. The advice at
| the end of the article seems interesting. Does anyone have any
| resources that might help with this?
| japanoise wrote:
| A Forth shibboleth is that you have to implement your own in
| order to understand it. Try reading the assembly, then forth
| source, for jonesforth:
| https://github.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth
|
| This is how I learned.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is the kind of malarkey I'd get up to on a personal project
| of mine. Like, I wonder if I'd get farther if I'd written it in
| Forth/TinyScheme/Erlang? May as well completely overhaul it and
| find out!
| RandomGuyDTB wrote:
| It's odd to highlight that Forth is 50 years old, considering C
| is 48 years old and still in very heavy use in operating systems
| development.
| downerending wrote:
| I suspect that a lot of readers have no idea how old it is.
|
| ( _I_ , on the other hand, have to be reminded that 50 years
| have passed.)
| lstodd wrote:
| It's odd to compare C and Forth. They are so different.
|
| Edit: as someone below mentioned there can not be a 'Standard
| Forth'. You just write your own one as you see fit.
| bitwize wrote:
| There's ANS Forth. Chuck Moore doesn't like it, but it
| exists.
| crousto wrote:
| Collapse OS was initially written in assembly for the Z80, a
| microprocessor first launched in 1976. The fact that Forth is 6
| years older than the Z80 seems interesting enough of a step
| further back in time to be hightlighted.
| moonchild wrote:
| Not to mention lisp, in which HN is written.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Perhaps Forth has changed less than C in that time. The C of 48
| years ago can look quite different from modern C.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| There has never been one Forth. In a world with N Forth
| programmers, one can expect roughly N implementations of
| Forth. Perhaps closer to 2*N. An ANS spec exists, but most
| Forth programmers would say it misses the point.
|
| Forth is a collection of ideas and philosophies toward
| programming as much as it is a language. Two stacks and a
| dictionary. Threaded code (direct, indirect, token,
| subroutine, etc...). Collapsed abstractions. No sealed black
| boxes. Tight factoring.
|
| C has changed. Forth is everchanging.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| There has been OpenFirmware.
| moonchild wrote:
| Not really. Function definitions look different, and we can
| declare variables in the middle of function bodies, but those
| are surface-level changes. The language itself hasn't changed
| appreciably.
| dang wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 from last
| year.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I love this project. Thank you for posting it. The idea of a post
| collapse operating system reminds me of slackware/subgenius's old
| slogan: "...the world ends tomorrow and you may die!"
|
| I'll be trying to compile collapseos, write forth and load
| slackware on floppys in a few years then. (Will systemd survive
| civilisation's collapse, especially when it caused it, that is
| the question....)
| mhd wrote:
| For me this is slightly into Poe's Law territory: Is this
| actual prepper mindset, or tongue-in-cheek?
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Thanks. I'd never heard of that law before. I think he's
| serious. I'll appreciate his work both pre and pos
| civilisation collapse. I like his software aesthetic too.
|
| Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm seeking more control, maybe
| the world has come needlessly complex, but there's a certain
| appeal about returning to more manageable days, where it was
| possible to fit a software and hardware system in your brain,
| and your brain was swimming with ideas on how to use a
| limited system rather than drowning in layers of complexity.
| undershirt wrote:
| > Forth doesn't elegantly describe complex algorithms... However,
| this mental pain does makes you question your need for
| complexity... This is something that I think few developers are
| familiar with and is hard to describe with words. It needs to be
| experienced.
|
| Nice framing, that it's not an intellectual argument you can make
| to justify the benefits of drawbacks (i.e. an infamous red flag
| of stockholm syndrome), so you have to point to the experience of
| the thing itself ("you had to be there").
| hxegon wrote:
| Or there are experiences which have hard to describe intangible
| qualities that are hard to put logically. Not sure why you have
| to reach for stockholm syndrome here.
| Koshkin wrote:
| CollapseOS? Meh. What we need is ApocalypsOS. Something to play
| Tetris on after having hauled a bucket of wellwater (and some
| wood) to the 23-rd floor apartment where I try to survive.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| https://collapseos.org/why.html
|
| "That being said, I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe
| that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel
| attacked by my beliefs."
|
| Triple negative? Quadruple negative? (If we count the second
| "don't".)
|
| Compare something like:
|
| "I consider it reasonable to believe that collapse is unlikely to
| happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs."
|
| It is almost as if the grammatical structure reflects the life
| perspective of the author.
| microcolonel wrote:
| There's a difference between "not unreasonable" and
| "reasonable".
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Can you provide more details?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _It is almost as if the grammatical structure reflects the
| life perspective of the author._
|
| That seems like a perfectly valid thing for grammatical
| structure to do, although this one tripped me up admittedly.
| megameter wrote:
| If I had to put my finger on why Forth is hard for most
| programmers, it's like this: the structured program theorem
| suggests using sequence, selection, and iteration to control
| program logic. Assembly code on hardware architectures will
| assign all meaning sequence-relative, late-binding the selection
| and iteration. Forth doubles down on this sequence-first approach
| through a more versatile assignment mode(the stack) while only
| minimally accommodating the other two. That makes it easy to
| implement, while not explicitly addressing expressability.
|
| Forth written "flat" with shallow data stack usage is assembly by
| another name, a wrapper for load-and-store; Forth that does
| everything with intricate stack manipulation is a source of
| endless puzzles since it quickly goes write-only.
|
| But, like any good language with meta expression capabilities,
| you can work your way up towards complex constructs in Forth, and
| write words that enforce whatever conceptual boundaries are
| needed and thus check your work and use the system as a compiler.
| That's what breaks Forth away from being a simple macro-
| assembler. But you have to write it in that direction, and design
| the system that makes sense for the task from the very beginning.
| That falls into an unacceptable trade-off really easily in our
| current world, where the majority of developers are relatively
| inexperienced consumers of innumerable dependencies.
| jstanley wrote:
| If this gets you interested in z80 hardware, I would recommend
| building an RC2014: https://rc2014.co.uk/
|
| I built an RC2014 after CollapseOS was posted last year, and
| thoroughly enjoyed it.
|
| I ended up adding a front panel, complete with switches and
| lights, to allow toggling in and executing code without a ROM,
| and also wrote a HTTP/1.0 server for CP/M (which was an enormous
| headache for lots of different reasons). Never did get around to
| running CollapseOS on it though.
| mbauman wrote:
| I love this project, and check in on it every few months. I
| particularly like the idea of scavenging hardware:
|
| > With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person
| should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS
| without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her
| design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools.
|
| I'd be interested in trying to build my own proof-of-concept,
| but my hardware experience pretty much starts and stops with
| kids' electronics kits from 20 years ago.
|
| Assuming I can scavenge a Z80, what would be a logical next
| step? What books/other resources should I be reading to learn
| more?
| KajMagnus wrote:
| > > _a capable and creative person should be able to manage
| to build and install_
|
| > _trying to build_
|
| What if there was a crowdfunding project to pay different
| people, to actually do this?
|
| They could find unclear things in the docs, or missing docs.
| Usability Testing, sort of, of Collapse OS?
|
| This is maybe pretty important after all :- ) More important
| than Fly-to-Mars rockets?
| [deleted]
| mshockwave wrote:
| this might be a dumb question but can someone briefly explain why
| Forth is more suitable over C or other languages in general on
| post-apocalyptic OS?
| yellowapple wrote:
| - It's tiny and dead simple to implement
|
| - It sits very close to assembly
|
| - It allows high-level programming like in C
|
| - The concept of pushing/popping things onto/off the stack is a
| relatively straightforward programming model when done
| consistently
|
| One of the old competitors to the likes of UEFI and uBoot is
| OpenFirmware (also known as OpenBoot), for which the primary UI
| is a Forth shell; OpenFirmware was the BIOS equivalent for
| Sun's SPARC workstations/servers (and still is for
| Oracle's/Fujistu's SPARC servers, last I checked) and most
| POWER hardware (including "New World" PowerPC Macs), among
| others. About the most delightful pre-boot environment I've
| used; it's a shame it didn't catch on in the x86 or ARM space.
| gridlockd wrote:
| It is very small.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I'm delighted to see that hsoft took suggestions about Forth to
| heart, and that it has lead to both simplification and enrichment
| of the project.
| haolez wrote:
| > Some Forth enthusiasts like the language for itself. They think
| that its easier to express much of the logic of a program in this
| language. Many books and tutorials are touting this. [...] That's
| not my opinion.
|
| In my opinion, it's not that FORTH code is hard to read, but that
| FORTH gives the programmer so much freedom that every program
| becomes its own microcosm of DSLs.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Is the focus on forth to rapidly bootstrap from more than just
| z80, or for readability, or for some other concern?
| messe wrote:
| Not the developer, just a forth enthusiast. But I'd imagine
| it's the ability to rapidly bootstrap on other architectures.
| Readability is just a bonus on top of that.
|
| The focus of CollapseOS is, well, an OS that can be used after
| society has collapsed, something running on scavenged chips on
| hand-soldered boards (in the worst case scenario).
|
| The original logic was the Z80 is still pretty prevalent, so it
| was thought to be a good choice to base the OS on.
|
| Turns out that a Forth interpreter/compiler is incredibly easy
| to write (just a few hundred bytes of a assembler, a few
| thousand at the upper end), so by using Forth they hugely
| expand the range of scavengeable chips.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| I hate this headline but the project is very cool. People like me
| who were ignorant should start here instead of the Github to get
| a better sense of the design goals (and why they are using
| Forth): https://collapseos.org/forth.html
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we'll change the url to that from https://github.com/hsoft/
| collapseos/commit/d777a74be30cefc1f.... Thanks!
|
| (Submitted title was "Collapse OS was entirely rewritten in
| Forth, a 50 year old language".)
|
| The project itself was discussed last year at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628.
| weare138 wrote:
| I think that's a better headline personally...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I've read that page and I'm still wondering why they're using
| FORTH.
|
| C has excellent portability and performance. The article agrees
| with the general consensus that C is also generally a better
| language for the programmer. So why use FORTH? What does it
| matter that it can do cute things with self-hosting? What does
| 'compactness' matter?
|
| If the goal is to build a portable means of writing programs
| for Z80 and AVR, why not develop a C-like language, or an IR,
| or put work into developing a serious optimising C compiler
| targeting the Z80? I get the impression that's a relatively
| unexplored area for (rather niche) compiler research.
| [deleted]
| krick wrote:
| I thought this is pretty fun project and the idea is just cool
| right away, but then I went on reading and was surprised by the
| fact it seems the author is serious. I would be really curious to
| hear his opinion on why the supply chains should collapse before
| 2030. Obviously, there wouldn't be a shortage of people in the
| comments who can start speculating on why it might happen, and,
| of course, I myself also can provide a couple of feasible
| scenarios, but nobody of us were serious enough to actually start
| this project, so _his_ opinion on the matter is somehow quite
| more interesting to me than it would normally be.
| arcadeparade wrote:
| If you had told me last year that we would have a pandemic,
| lockdown, massive economic recession and job loss and now riots
| and protests etc and all at the same time I probably wouldn't
| have believed it. I'm starting to think the world is a lot more
| fragile than we all thought.
| wwright wrote:
| Not "we all" thought -- plenty of people have been saying
| this would happen for years. Specifically, epidemiologists
| and black people. Maybe we should listen more!
| slim wrote:
| he gives a book name "Comment tout peut s'effondrer" by Pablo
| Servigne, Editions du Seuil, 2015
|
| https://collapseos.org/why.html
| messe wrote:
| Nice. Must revisit my own Forth OS, or maybe just start
| contributing to this.
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(page generated 2020-06-07 23:00 UTC)