FFL

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Engines

Supported Forth engines

FFL will run on and is tested with the following forth engines :

Engine	Since
GForth	0.1.0
BigForth	0.2.0
PFE	0.3.0
Win32Forth	0.4.0
Fina	0.5.0
MinForth	0.5.0
iForth	0.6.0
SP-Forth	0.7.0
lxf/ntf	0.7.0
VFXForth	0.8.0
SwiftForth	0.9.0

For these forth engines there is a config file present in the distribution package.

Unsupported Forth Engines

FFL will not run on the following forth engines :

Engine	Version	Reason
kForth		Missing ANS words
ciforth	4.0.6	Missing ANS words
pforth		Missing ANS words
isforth		Missing ANS words
4th		Missing ANS words
helforth	2.51	Missing ANS words

Not yet checked Forth Engines

• RetroForth
• ficl
• forth4p
• ...

Environmental dependencies

A few modules have environmental dependencies. As a result they will not be present for some forth engines. For these modules you should test the presence of the version constant after loading the module (see Using Getting started).

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth	MinForth	iForth	SP-Forth	lxf/ntf	VFXForth
Argument Parser (arg)	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
Distributed Random Number Generator (rdg)	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Timer (tmr)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
GTK-server interface (gsv)	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	?	Yes	Yes	Yes

Some notes for the GTK-server interface:

• gsv is for the moment only tested on Linux.
• PFE will sometimes get stuck or report a broken pipe.
• BigForth and MinForth have problems with the long names of the GTK functions.

Benchmarks

Version 0.8.0

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth	MinForth	SP-Forth	lxf	VFXForth
Compile Time (msec)	1087	251	459	1467	4280	2680	344	500
Compile Size (bytes)	247784	210820	222204	218196	231732	214777	211599	356392
Test Time (sec)	4.2	2.9	11.2	8.7	48.6	5.6	2.1	2.1

Version 0.7.0

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth	MinForth	SP-Forth	lxf
Compile Time (msec)	850	328	517	1248	3780	2530	310
Compile Size (bytes)	224912	196089	209764	203748	215676	201260	206142
Test Time (sec)	4.1	3.4	11.2	11.3	49.0	5.6	2.0

Version 0.6.0

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth	MinForth
Compile Time (msec)	1774	352	720	2630	9440
Compile Size (bytes)	169560	146406	166704	97176	106600
Test Time (sec)	7.9	8.2	24.1	15.3	140.2

Version 0.5.0

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth	MinForth
Compile Time (msec)	1020	220	374	1760	6100
Compile Size (bytes)	132724	115090	133796	75696	83128
Test Time (sec)	6.8	8.2	23.6	14.3	132.9

Version 0.4.0

	GForth	BigForth	PFE	Win32Forth
Compile Time (msec)	690	158	255	1200
Compile Size (bytes)	103132	89710	112628	59660
Test Time (sec)	3.8	6.2	9.2	9.6

Legenda:

• The Compile Time is the time required to include all modules in the dictionary.
• The Compile Size is the space required in the dictionary to include all modules.
• The Test time is the time required to include and run all the test scripts.

Notes:

• Benchmarks for versions 0.4.0 till 0.6.0 were done on a Celeron 700 MHZ.
• Benchmarks for version 0.7.0 and higher were done on an Athlon 64 X2 1800MHZ

Porting

As already stated the FFL is mostly written in ANS forth. If the forth engine you are using, is not listed on the [Engines] page and it conforms to the ANS-standard, you can try porting ffl to your forth engine by adding words to and removing words from the ffl/config.fs file. If you succeed, you can send me the config.fs file so that I can add it to the distribution.