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romforth ported to the '3 cent' microcontroller

Jay Carlson blogged about the 3 cent microcontroller all the way back in 2019.

In particular I liked this comment of his: "When you're working on a part with no peripherals, 1K of program memory, and 64 bytes of RAM, you are probably not going to the moon (that would require 70K of program memory and 2K of RAM YouTube."

Ok, so you cannot go to the moon, but can you at least get Forth running on it?

Turns out the answer is, of course.

I've recently ported romforth to the PDK13 (in emulation, using Daniel Drotos excellent ucsim_pdk simulator for the Padauk microcontrollers).

This is not a standalone Forth with a full REPL and all the other bells and whistles since the hardware does not have enough Flash/ROM to hold all of that code but what I've ported can be thought of an "umbilical"/hosted Forth which I classify as "2/4" (aka twoforth, as per the romforth naming scheme that is spelled out in the README.

Using romforth allows you to create newer definitions (coded in Forth) and also gives you Forth's familiar parameter/data and return stacks for data manipulation and processing.

As you can see in the asciinema recording below, the build completes faster than I can type "make" into the terminal and that should exactly be how your build environment for a tiny device like this should work.

asciinema recording of the pdk13 build