Forth seems like it's the shortest path from Turing tarpit to an actually ergonomic development environment. The only issue is that almost every Forth is totally unique...
I want to make my own :)
"Meta-compilation" seems like a really cool way to build a Forth system, using nothing but an existing Forth system. My understanding is that it basically involves defining some words (functions in any other language) to serve as an assembler for the target system, defining the heart of the new Forth system using that, and then working your way up, using all the capabilities of the host system.
Because I just love shaving yaks, I want to start from nothing. The first step will be boot-strapping a host Forth system. Something portable would be nice, but specifically targeting amd64 Linux is fine too.
The target, for now, is an nRF52 dev kit. Mainly because I have one handy, and of all the MCUs I've seen with an integrated radio Nordic seems to be the only one that documents its registers. It's an ARM Cortex-M4 core running at 64MHz, and a quick study of the datasheet leads me to believe the peripherals are sane. All-in-all it should be a pretty fun target for bare-metal shenanigans.
Once I have a minimal system in some stinky non-Forth language, I can flesh out that system, including an assembler for the target.
Assembler in hand, I can define the nucleus of the target Forth: the inner interpreter and some set of words that would be inconvenient to define in Forth.
Ideally, at this stage, the same word definitions that completed the host Forth can be used to complete the target Forth... I'm feeling a little like I've spun around in my chair for too long.
It should be a relatively simple matter of writing the target Forth to disk to be loaded onto the target.
Okay, not exactly starting from nothing.
I've started a basic Forth implementation written in C.
It's a fairly basic indirect-threaded design, where the cell is the same size as a pointer using intptr_t.
I'll probably have a post later describing its design, along with a link to a Git repo.
Before that I probably need to set up Forgejo or something.
To be continued...