Re: [Amforth] AmForth Project open for adoption

[Martin N. <amf...@mg...>]

Erich,

Thanks for all your work.

You may wish to advertise the vacancy on the USENET comp.lang.forth. A
G account will do the job.

On Fri, 06 May 2022 09:17:23 +0200
Erich Wälde <ew....@na...> wrote:

> Dear AmForthers,
> 
> I am herewith stepping down from the maintainer role of AmForth. For
> details, read on. If anyone is interested to take over, get in touch
> with me.
> 
> 
> In 2020 I received the logins of amforth.sourceforge.net, basically
> because I was lucky enough to have met Matthias personally a few
> times. At that time I had a lot of ideas on how to proceed. And while
> I managed to create an official release, there are a few obstacles in
> this path.
> 
> First and foremost I am facing a health issue. It is subtle, but it
> seriously limits, what I can do. I still have to make several
> difficult decisions regarding my daily life. I have started to
> decrease the number of things on my list by cancelling items. I have
> to accept the fact, that I'm not in a position any more to advance
> the AmForth project in a meaningful way.
> 
> Secondly, AmForth has become complex over time. Matthias added
> support for three more target platforms (msp430, arm, riscv32).
> Allthough access to these is easily achievable, I use only avr. And I
> use it less these days.
> 
> Thirdly, AmForths tools are depending heavily on python code, a
> language I consider myself illiterate in. I have written a few small
> perl scripts around AmForth to serve my needs. I heavily depend on
> those and on a Makefile.
> 
> Add the fact, that in 2020 I spent countless hours to port my data
> acquisition stuff at home from amforth 4.6 to 6.9 and it just did not
> become stable. To this day I still have no clue, why the thing hangs
> itself after some time, sometimes hours, sometimes several days. In
> other words: unusable.
> 
> 
> Step back: what would I have done, if I didn't know Matthias, and the
> project would just have become silent? Simplify. Simplify heavily.
> 
> Very recently I have made a fork of AmForth release 5.0. That version
> is before support for msp430 was officially added (5.5). That version
> happens to compile with avra rather than wine/avrasm2.exe. Along the
> way I found, that avra has seen new releases, which add support for
> my beloved atmega644p and lots of fixes, which is nice! This removes
> the dependancy from wine and allows for smaller systems for
> development.
> 
> So I have picked up my data acquisition project again with the fork
> mentioned above. Any Interrupt Service Routines are written in
> assembly to avoid the thing that I uncovered in 2017, namely a race
> condition 1 bit wide and 1 instruction cycle long. I pick missing
> bits and pieces from later releases. I would like to add a few
> features regarding sensors with different needs. A first experiment
> has run more than 10^6s (12d) without any failure. So I am moderately
> optimistic to continue along this simplified path.
> 
> 
> Thanks to all, who have answered the list, contributed code, ideas,
> documentation in one form or other. It has been an interesting
> experience. And should you still care to listen: if you have one or a
> few more important plans, do not delay them, you might be unable to
> pursue them later.
> 
> Happy hacking, and use the Forth!
> 
> Cheers
> Erich
> 



-- 
Regards,

Martin Nicholas.

E-mail: mg...@mg....