Home

Awesome

Forth on WASM

This repo (sort of) runs a Forth interpreter natively (no transpilation!) in any browser that supports Web Assembly. The Forth interpreter (the part written in C) was originally authored by Leif Bruder in 2014 under a public domain license. Thanks, Leif!

It sort of works, but unfortunately, causes the browser to hang. I would really like to know why, but have yet to find a cause.

Issues

  1. forth.c runs great on Linux x64 via gcc. See forth_native_exe to try it on your own machine. The source was compiled via gcc forth_native.c -o forth_native_exe. I only had to change the original source in two places to compile native vs. WASM (relates to cell size).
  2. When compiling forth_wasm.c to binary (see: program.wasm and index.html) via WASM Fiddle, the program sort-of-kind-of runs. The problem is that it does not pause and freezes the browser tab on both Chrome and Firefox.

How to Replicate

  1. (optional) Run forth_native_exe on a Linux machine. Notice that it does not crash.
  2. Open index.html in Chrome. Notice that it crashes. This link will cause your tab to hang, probably.
  3. Open index.html in Firefox. Notice that it crashes. This link will cause your tab to hang, probably.

...does anyone have any ideas as to why?

License

forth.c is licensed as public domain software. All other code is licensed under the MIT license.