Forth Day 2012 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

SVFIG on Google+ Hangout- long url - tinyurl

Videos - morning (3:28:07) - afternoon (2:37:19) - Fireside Chat (0:54:38)

08:00

Coffee and a Chat

08:30

Chairman's Welcome - George Perry

08:35

The Year in Review - Kevin Appert

SVFIG Year in Review - 1.18 Mb pdf file

08:45

3 Part Bach Fugues on Arduino: Fixed! - CH Ting
"The ATmega328 chip on the Arduino has 3 counter-timers which can be configured to play three independent voices on three speakers. Last time (October) when I demonstrated at SVFIG, the voices missed many notes. The problem is that the counters must be stopped and cleared before configuring to play different notes. I will show the code that corrects this, play some three part fugues."

09:05

Literate Programming Today: What I Did This Year - Dennis A. Ruffer
Dennis will recap his work on Literate Programming this year. You can review his presentations from January, February, and August.

Literate Programming Today - 3.34 Mb pdf file

09:15

Kestrel-2 - Lessons Learned - Samuel A. Falvo II
What is a Kestrel-2 Forth-based computer? What can we expect when the machine is released? What is on the Kestrel's future roadmap? What did Sam learn or discover while working on it?

Sam's Kestrel Project on Bitbucket

09:40

Break

10:00

SwiftX on the TI LaunchPad - Kevin Appert
Kevin will give a short review of some MSP-430 code.

Slides - 79.8 Kb pdf file

10:10

SwiftX-ARM on Embedded Linux Boards - Leon Wagner
"FORTH, Inc. recently did a port of SwiftX-ARM for an embedded Linux board for one of our industrial clients. It turns out that this same kernel runs on more embedded Linux boards, including the BeagleBoard (and probably the Raspberry Pi). I'll do a quick demonstration of the software environment on the BeagleBoard and on one of the industrial controller boards."

Slides - 153 Kb pdf file

FORTH, Inc.

"There may be a first release candidate of the new Forth-2012 Standard document available by Forth Day. If there is time, I'll take a few minutes to introduce it."

10:40

Porting Gforth to Native Client - Brad Nelson
NativeClient allows constrained x86/arm machine code to run inside the Chrome web browser. Brad will present a port of Gforth running inside the Chrome web browser using NativeClient.

Slides

Brad's GitHub website

10:55

Creole Forth in Depth - Joseph M. O'Connor
Creole Forth is a simple Forth-like programming language developed as a component in Borland Delphi. Joe has ported Creole to Lazarus, a free cross-platform IDE which provides a Delphi-like development experience. Joe will present a discussion of Creole's architecture and how he has used it in his various projects.

Slides - 83 Kb pdf file

Joe's Github repository

Note: Joe will be bringing a limited number of bootable LinuxLiveDVDs with Lazarus pre-installed and Creole on them. If you really, really want one, please bring a thumb drive with 1.5 GB of free space on it for the ISO image, just in case we run out.

10:55

PICKy: A Processor with Deep Stack Access - Aliaksei Chapyzhenka
Why are PICK and ROLL widely disregarded by the Forth community? Can deep stack access be part of instruction set architecture? How can stack allocation use PICK to speed up the code? The presentation will include perspectives, experiments, and findings.

Slides

11:45

Automatic Synthesis of Forth Programs - Prof Ras Bodik, Mangpo Phitchaya Phothilimthana, Tikhon Jelvis, and Rohin Shah, all at The University of California, Berkeley
"We will demonstrate how modern Boolean Satisfiability solvers can be used for synthesis of optimal Forth programs and how such synthesizers may help schedule communication on the GreenArrays processors. This is ongoing work at UC Berkeley."

Slides - 768 Kb pdf file

12:05

Lunch
Lunch was catered by CH Ting, a Forth Day tradition!

13:30

GreenArrays- Greg Bailey, Peter Milford, John Rible, Stefan Maverhofer, and Charley Shattuck
The afternoon session will be devoted entirely to GreenArrays and their parallel processing Forth chips. The afternoon will start with a short briefing on the progress of GreenArrays in the last year and a glimpse of its plans for the company's future. GreenArrays engineers and partners will discuss the chips and their applications, presenting high-level insights and strategies for choreographing the work of teams of computers in a variety of applications. Management and data flow will be emphasized, rather than detailed examination of coding.

Slides

Choreographing Teams of Fast, Low-Power Computers - Greg Bailey - 1.13 Mb pdf file

Digital IO on Green Arrays' GA144 implemented in polyFORTH® - Peter Milford - 952 Kb pdf file

16:00

Fireside Chat - Chuck Moore
Almost every year since the early days of FIG, Chuck has held a fireside chat, commenting on our favorite programming language.

17:00

Clean Up and Adjourn

17:45

Dinner
We dined at Su Hong in Palo Alto as the Menlo Park location was being remodeled.

14:45

Break

Coming in December

Quantum Computing - Jack Woehr
Jack has volunteered to do a remote "Hangout" presentation.

Other items:

Forth

Forth Day on SlashNet

4E4th-IDE is a totally self-contained Integrated Development Environment written for starting Forth novice youngsters for MSP430G2553 LaunchPad and a PC (Windows XP or Windows 7). By Dirk Bruehl

Forth for Education - 4E4th and 4E4th IDE

Forth for Education - 4E4th and 4E4th IDE (alternate location)

Software download

First Steps with 4E4th

Computers

Software

Kozio Verification and Test OS (based on pForth)

Utilities

How To Run Chrome OS From a USB Drive and Use It on Any Computer

Hardware

Adapteva Developments: From RTL to GDSII in just six weeks

Forth Programming Books

Articles

Stores

Robots

Games

Companies

Forth Jobs - submitted by Dennis Ruffer

Lectures

People

GreenArrays

Surplus Houses

Meetings

Videos

Books

Courses

Podcasts

Other

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