What is muforth?
muforth is a small, simple, fast, indirect-threaded code (ITC) Forth intended for use as a cross-compiler for microcontrollers and other embedded devices. It is written in C and its core is very portable. Because of its Forth nature, it is naturally extensible, scriptable, and customizable.
It is very well-suited to interactive coding, debugging, and exploration, and is a great tool for bringing up new hardware.
It has support – in varying degrees of completeness – for a number of different architectures and chip families.
Under active development
- 8051
- ARMv6-m (aka Cortex-M0/M0+)
- ARMv7-m (aka Cortex-M3/M4)
- MSP430 (TI)
- RISC-V (initially, the SiFive FE310 and GigaDevice GD32VF103)
Dormant, or less actively developed
- ARMv5 (originally targeting an ARM AEB-1 board running an ARM7DI processor)
- AVR (Atmel)
- HC08 and HCS08 (Motorola/Freescale/NXP)
- PIC18 (Microchip)
Why yet another Forth?
I initially wrote muforth because I wanted to try out some implementation ideas. The core language primitives are written in C, but initially muforth compiled Forth words via a simple native code compiler for the x86. I quickly realized that simplicity and portability were more important than speed. The current implementation is a straightforward indirect-threaded Forth - and it is quite fast!
Its implementation is no longer the point. Its sole reason for existing is to be a cross-compiler for other Forths, and their implementations are in no way tied to muforth’s.
By keeping it small and simple, it is much more likely to be a useful tool that people can customize.
It’s BSD licensed, so do what you want with it! I’d love to hear about innovative or unusual uses of muforth.
Starting points
BUILDING will tell you how to build muforth. It’s stupid simple.
Look in mu/target/ to find a target that interests you. There is
generally a mu/target/<target-name>/build.mu4 that loads the cross-build
environment. Use it as an “index” to find the assembler, disassembler,
meta-compiler, kernel, and other key pieces of code.
Documentation
Sadly, there isn’t a lot of documentation right now. A good place to start is to read the source.
The code – both the C code that implements the Forth virtual machine and the muforth code that does everything else – is carefully and in some cases extensively (even obsessively!) commented. Right now your best source of documentation is the code! Luckily for you, there isn’t that much of it, so reading it is actually possible. That’s part of the point of muforth; I want it to be a convivial tool.
The heart of the system is the Forth code that muforth reads when it first starts: mu/startup.mu4. You’ll learn a lot by reading this!
muforth.nimblemachines.com is also, finally, spreading its wings.
Talks
In March 2008 I gave a talk about bootstrapping, muforth, and convivial tools.
Warning: I wave my arms around a lot, and the audio and video quality isn’t that great, but you might find it interesting, or at least amusing.
It’s also hard to see my slides. If you want to “follow along”, download my
slides, and use less to view them – ideally in a
text window that is at least 30 lines high – like so:
less -30 ~/muforth/talks/2008-mar-30-PNCA
