Stack computers
47% recommend42% neutral11% critical
Why HN recommends it
Survey of stack computer architecture and its tradeoffs against register machines. Valued for clear coverage of the design space and Forth-oriented chips; free online, a go-to reference for architecture readers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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What timing - I just read "Stack Computers: the new wave" by Philip Koopman (http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/contents.h...). I'm pretty sure it was recommended by someone on HN, but it's quite a nice mid\late 1980s take on a…
on “A C Compiler for Stack Machines (2006) [pdf]” ↗…computer) chips (they may have had some similar predecessors) that did that funny encoding. The RTX2010 was more like the Novix and had a 16 bit instruction word. See: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_5.ht... That book has good coverage of the Forth chips of that era. This undergraduate thesis has some later developments: http://fpgacpu.ca/stack/Second-Generation_Stack_Computer_Arc... Related…
on “Space-Related Applications of Forth (1998)” ↗'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem 'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham 'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold 'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman 'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie 'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley 'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly 'Modern Painters:…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013” ↗…http://www.xlisp.org/ https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=dr+dobbs+betz I really like http://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design... and http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/
on “How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch” ↗…designs (<15% of a small devices resources @ 100MHz). Honestly, I wrote this just to scratch an itch. I've always loved the elegance of Forth, and having stumbled upon (http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.html) that, I decided to create my own, with the goal of having single-cycle execution of all non-control-flow operations. Having said that, one could easily take it, and probably fairly quickly…
on “Show HN: A 16-bit Forth machine written in VHDL” ↗…machine sand Forth. To quote the book: "While some of the material is obviously dated and new work has been done in this area, I believe that the book remains the principal reference work on Forth-style stack computers. " https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.htm... It is also available on Amazon for a dollar. The author's page: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack.html
on “Register-based VMs have a higher performance than stack-based VMs” ↗…you can hold in your head all at once, contrasted with modern handhelds or desktops. Two books: (I really enjoyed the first one, multiple times) "Threaded Interpretive Languages", by R. G. Loeliger. "Stack Computers: The New Wave", by Philip Koopman. Two short papers: (maybe not profound, but they're short and available online) "Handling Multiple Data Types in Forth", by John J Wavrik. https://www.math.ucsd.edu/~jwavrik/pub/11_jfar.pdf…
on “My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)” ↗My quirky book that I think deserved more attention (the book as well as the subject) is "Stack Computers: the new wave by Philip J. Koopman, Jr": https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.htm... (The book is free to download by the author.) Fairly fresh into comp arch, this book really…
on “Quirky computing books” ↗…single instruction, multiple thread. if anyone does, let me know finally, chuck moore's line of two-stack processors based on forth are a sadly underdeveloped branch of the genealogical tree; koopman's stack computers: the new wave https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.htm... goes into their historical development a bit. they had some significant success in the 80s (the novix nc4000 and the harris…
on “Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981” ↗After this gained prominence I took a hard read of Koopman's Stack Computers: The New Wave intent on writing an interpreter. I sought some optimization properties that would apply to the modern requirements for ILP, OoE and parallelization at low core frequencies -- none are offered.…
on “Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)” ↗…into one instruction that accessed main memory, the operand stack, and the return stack at the same time! http://www.forth.com/archive/jfar/vol3/no2/article38.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_4.ht...
on “Show HN: A simple bare-metal Forth for the PDP-10” ↗…in hardware -- it had separate data and return stacks, which it could push or pop at the same time, so the compiler could combine several FORTH words into one opcode. http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_4.htm... >The Novix NC4016, formerly called the NC4000, is a 16-bit stack based microprocessor designed to execute primitives of the Forth programming language. It was the first single-chip Forth…
on “Forth vs Lisp” ↗The Novix Forth chip? ;) https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_4.html
on “JavaScript right on the hardware” ↗A very closely related processor, the RTX2000, is described in detail in Koopman's book "Stack Computers: the new wave" http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.html The RTX2010 has had its own wikipedia entry too since 2008 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTX2010
on “RTX2010 – Radiation-hardened stack machine microprocessor” ↗…in hardware -- it had separate data and return stacks, which it could push or pop at the same time, so the compiler could combine several FORTH words into one opcode. http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_4.htm... The Novix NC4016, formerly called the NC4000, is a 16-bit stack based microprocessor designed to execute primitives of the Forth programming language. It was the first single-chip Forth…
on “Design of Lisp-Based Processors Or, LAMBDA: The Ultimate Opcode (1979) [pdf]” ↗