Slashdot Mirror
Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On
Chuck Moore is, among other things, a chip designer. His latest design, the 25x, is based on a 5x5 array of X18 microprocessor cores, and could provide 60,000 MIPS with a production cost of about one dollar. And Moore has the chops to back that up: he's been designing tiny, efficient processors for many years. He's also the inventor of the programming language Forth, which has evolved from a miniscule but radically fast language "difficult for a human to read" (according to The Secret Guide) to the even more radical colorForth. How radical? Try "includes own operating system; has own 27-key Dvorak keyboard layout; meaningful color syntax." How's that for starters? Ask below your questions for Chuck about processors and programming (ask all you'd like, but one per post, please) We'll pass the best ones on to him, answers soon to follow.
I learned forth early on in my programming career; it was very memory and CPU efficient, something that was important on early microcomputers. It was also a great deal of fun (though far less fun to try and understand what you wrote a week earlier...). Today, even small, cheap microcontrollers are able to run fairly sophisticated programs, and it is far easier to cross-compile stuff on a 'big' machine and just drop the compiled code onto the development board.
Forth has (in my eyes) always been about small and efficient. Today, though, embedded apps are more likely to be written in C than in forth, and the "OS as part to the language" thing isn't as compelling today as it was in the eighties. Where is forth being used today, and where do you see it going in the future?
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This one would probably require a bit more time to answer than you probably have available, but a quick rundown would be cool: Where do you see programming languages headed -vs- where do you think they SHOULD be headed? Java, C#, and some of the other 'newer' languages seem to be a far cry from Fourth, but are languages headed (in your opinion) in the proper direction?
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The 25X system reminded me of IBM's Blue Gene computer, where a large number of inexpensive CPU cores are placed on a single chip.
The biggest problem in dealing with a large number of small cores lies in the programming. I.e. how do you design and code a program that can utilize a thousand cores efficiently for some kind of operation? This goes beyond multi-threading into an entirely different kind of program organization and execution.
Do you see Forth (or future extensions to Forth) as a solution to this kind of problem? Does 25X dream of scaling to the magnitude that IBM envisions for Blue Gene? Do you think massively parrallel computing with inexpensive, expendable cores clustered on cheap die's will hit the desktop or power-user market, or forver be constrained to research...