Written in RISC-V assembly, this tiny Forth port is open source and fully functional on the Longan Nano microcontroller.
Developer Alexander Williams has written and released a “tiny hand-written” port of the Forth programming language to the low-cost Longan Nano RISC-V microcontroller, using only RISC-V assembly — and it’s called FiveForths.
“I fixed the compiler and now FiveForths is fully functional,” Williams writes. “When I say done, I mean ‘fully functional.’ There are still some optimizations and improvements I want to make in the future, but so far it’s just about ‘done.'”
First released in 1970 by Charles H. Moore, Forth is a stack-oriented programming language that failed to make inroads in the early home computing market against rival BASIC but which found itself a niche in the embedded sector — including use in various space applications, from astronomy to the Philae space-faring robot developed by the European Space Agency to deliver the first-ever non-destructive landing on a comet nucleus.