Squeak forth and Logo

>goran at krampe.se wrote on Thu Apr 27 18:49:24 UTC 2006:
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>>A few other interesting things in this area:
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>>- FuelVM. This is actually a VM written in C (IIRC) that takes forth
>>code as its "bytecodes". Interesting stuff, but I don't think it is
>>developed right now.
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>Saw your mail (and some related(?) chat logs) when I was Googling -- for the
>first time in a long time -- for "fuelvm".  Since it was only a few months
>ago, I figured I'd respond.
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>I am the author of FuelVM.  It is not what one would call "actively being
>developed" mostly because it was finished.  At least, it was finished in the
>sense of being complete and meeting its original design goals.  Beyond that,
>it has not, to my knowledge, actually been used anywhere, so there has been
>no motivation to fix bugs (there are no known bugs) or add features.
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>The system does use GNU Lightning to provide the underlying "portable
>machine code" layer, and I would have to tell you that it, while complex and
>wonderful in design, leaves a few things to be desired on the POWERPC and
>SPARC platforms.  One "open project" is to write a replacement for GNU
>Lightning, but I have had no motivation to pursue it.
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>If you have any questions about FuelVM, I'd be happy to address them.  I
>tried to read some context to see how it came up on your list, but I was
>unable to get much more than the general mention that it has some
>interesting bits.
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>If I say so myself, it does have some interesting bits, particularly in
>regard to being designed for embedding.  The system has support for threads,
>GC, external dynamic linkage, and other "cool stuff", but it does not
>require or depend on any of those things being present.  It does not even
>depend on C Standard Library functionality, such as printf() and malloc().
>The system is fully reentrant and VM instances require only a few hundred
>bytes of memory (minimally), facilitating direct stack allocation. All of
>the implementation internals and external interfaces are performed with
>function pointer structures -- a slight sacrifice of speed that obtains
>nearly arbitrary customization opportunities.
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>This system was built as a "design demonstration", to show that it is
>possible to build a fully featured, fast system that could have a very tiny
>core and that didn't have to tie itself to particular libraries.  Because it
>is intended to just be a "core", there has been little follow on to expand
>it or pile features onto it.  The concept is that with support for direct
>linkage (defining Forth words to call routines in the embedding system) and
>dynamic linkage (opening dynamic libraries to access X11 routines & such), a
>user of the system can add-on anything they want.
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>Anyway, I am pleasantly surprised to see anyone mention it, so thanks for
>that.  I am going to go look at some of the other systems you mentioned in
>the same thread.
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>--
>John Redford
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