Mecrisp

It's great to have a Forth ported to so many platforms. Presently using it on a Risc-V Longan Nano and an Icebreaker FPGA with a J1a soft core, both interesting processors, all open source, although not all GPL3. Also runs native Linux or emulated. I get some of the German, Google translate helps with the rest. Dad said German would be useful, he was right. Tag

This is a great implementation of Forth for the Pico. After watching 0033mer's YouTube video, I decided to give it a try and after a few days I was able to do all the things he did in the video plus more. There was some rather tedious work at getting all the gpio pin registers setup and creating low-level words to manipulate the registers but it a great learning experience. I have done a lot of this in ST ARM chips in Ada but coming back to Forth after many years away was great.

I have used FORTH for many years, even writing an optimising compiler for MC68K in the mid 1980s. I have used mecrisp-stellaris for about 2 years. I have not up till now needed to dive into the details beyond the builtin 'see' facilities. I have not had any problems with the quality of code produced. Performance has been excellent. Mecrisp-stellaris is a really excellent implementation, and the -ra extensions bring it up to the level of producing excellent code competiitve with traditional compilers. Truly a remarkable achievement. I have recently started integration of mecrisp into an existing C program and have become even more impressed with the code base as I have needed to debug the startup and memory management features in order to check that C/C++ and FORTH do not interfere with each other and that the two can communicate through shared facilities. A worthwhile download.

This is the fastest way to get started on many of the ARM chips that are available! Once the firmware was loaded I was able to start checking out the hardware interactively. When I had a problem I posted to the forum and Matthias checked it out and made the changes. Now I don't have to worry about the steep learning curve of assembly or C libraries, I am up and running and building an ARM chip into a product with a way to load and test new firmware interactively with nothing more than a serial terminal and a text editor. I rate aspects of Mecrisp 4 instead of 5 because I would like to see more :)

The Quintus variant works great on RISC-V RV32im, even at version level less than 1.0. Very responsive to suggestions.