Re: [Amforth] Waking up a dormant forum :-)

[Matthias T. <mt...@we...>]

Hi Enoch,

> Can somebody give me good reasons why we should not convert
> words/*.asm implementations (as much as possible) from VM assembly
> to AVR assembly.

I should do so, perhaps ;)

>
> For example:

A well chosen one, indeed.

> There are two good reasons to prefer the AVR implementation:
>
> 1. Speed (10x faster?)

Speed is always an argument. Size too. And maintainability.
And the indisputable fact that forth makes more fun than
assembler.

> 2. Ease of debugging through the Studio.

I used the AVR Studio years ago when I started
with the inner core of amforth. Since it worked
(around version 0.1) I never used it again.

> Comments? [flames :-)]

You example patch is welcome, it is indeed an
improvement in both size and speed. Thanks for it;
the current code is an artefact from the times
I thought an 3 byte cell size is worth doing.

In general I'd like to see as much as possible
code written in forth. Most of the "VM" code
solves the chicken-and-egg problem, I should
remove what's not needed for that purpose and
put it into the lib/ directory tree. But I
already hear the screams, that this stripped
system will be too difficult to use.

I found it interesting that quite a lot of
forth code examples need less space than the
respective assembly code. Trivialities excluded.

Matthias