Hello all,

BugsForth is a native compiler for the Bugs18 CPU. The intro doc is hosted at http://laughtonelectronics.com/BugsForth.html (thanks Jeff).

Myron Plichota

Thanks Myron, and welcome!

Thank you for welcoming me, BigEd.

Starting out on this forum has been a pleasant experience for me, and I look forward to discovering more about the other members' work as we explore and share our passion for experimental CPU design.

I've learned a lot creating the Bugs18 SoC and BugsForth. I'm learning more by programming BugsForth apps. The minimal instruction set is terrible for implementing the comparison/flag-generating ops like < 0= etc. In my next CPU, the instruction set will be expanded to include these as single-cycle instructions. Ditto for - and a few other math primitives.

Myron Plichota

I look forward to some interesting trade-offs! It's not so easy to see, but in principle every little bit of complexity in a CPU will cause a little bit of slowdown in the clock speed. (Perhaps more often, the clock speed is a hard target based on external memory, or a necessarily slow path, and it's more a question of adding just a little complexity at a time until that hard target is only just met.)

That's the knife edge to balance on all righty. For the time being, I'm digging into developing apps as-is. With a cross-section of code examples available, I'll be able to consider the tradeoffs based on the statistical frequency of the slower, canonical ops that concern me.