Back the day people had BASIC and some machines had Forth and it was like

        print "Hello world"

        ." Hello world " / .( Hello world )

for Forth.

By comparison, giving how they optimized the games for 8 and 16 bit machines I should have been able to compile Cataclysm DDA:BN under my potato netbook and yet it needs GIGABYTES of RAM to compile, it crazy that you need damn swap for something it required far less RAM 15 years ago for the same features.

If the game was reimplemented in Golang it wouldn't feel many times slower. But no, we are suffering the worst from both sides of the coin: something that should have been replaced by Inferno -plan9 people, the C and Unix creators and now Golang, their cousin- with horrible compiline times, horrible and incompatible ABI's, featuritis, crazy syntax with templates and if you are lucky, memory safety.

Meanwhile I wish the forked Inferno/Purgatorio got a seamless -no virtual desktops- mode so you fired the application in a VM integrated with the guest window manager -a la Java- and that's it. Limbo+Tk+Sqlite would have been incredible for CRUD/RAD software once the GUI was polished up a little, with sticky menus as TCL/Tk and the like. In the end, if you know Golang you could learn Limbo's syntax (same channels too) with ease.

▲ hnlmorg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

BASIC was slow in the 80s. Games for the C64 (and similar machines) were written in machine code.

> By comparison, giving how they optimized the games for 8 and 16 bit machines I should have been able to compile Cataclysm DDA:BN under my potato netbook and yet it needs GIGABYTES of RAM to compile, it crazy that you need damn swap for something it required far less RAM 15 years ago for the same features.

That’s not crazy. You’re comparing interpreted, line delimited, ASCII, with a compiler that converts structured ASCII into machine code.

The two processes are as different to one another as a driving a bus is to being a passenger on it.

I don’t understand what your point is in the next two paragraphs. What Go, TCL, UNIX nor Inferno have to do with the C64 or modern software. So you’ll have to help out there.

▲

anthk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Compare Limbo+Tk under Inferno with current C#/Java. Or C++ against Plan9C.

We have impressive CPU's running really crappy software.

Remember Claude Code asking 66GB for a damn CLI AI agent for something NetBSD under a Vax (real or physical) from 1978 could do with NCurses in miliseconds every time you spawn Nethack or any other NCurses tool/game.

On speed, Forth for the ACE was faster than Basic running under the ZX80. So, it wasn't about using a text-parsed language. Forth was fast, but people was not ready for neither RPN nor to manage the stack, people tought in an algebraic way.

But that was an 'obsolete' mindset, because once you hit HS you were supposed to split 'big problems into smaller tasks (equations). In order to implement a 2nd degree equation solver in Forth you wouldn't juggle with the stack; you created discrete functions (words) for the discrimination part and so on.

In the end you just managed two stack items per step.

If Forth won instead of Basic, instead of allowing spaghetti code as a normal procedure we would be pretty much asking to decompose code into small functions as the right thing to do from the start.

	▲	hnlmorg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Most dialects of BASIC actually had functions too. They just weren’t popularised because line numbers were still essential for line editing on home micros. > On speed, Forth for the ACE was faster than Basic running under the ZX80. So, it wasn't about using a text-parsed language. Forth and BASIC are completely different languages and you’re arguing a different point to the one I made too. Also I don’t see much value in hypothetical arguments like “if Forth won instead of BASIC” because it didn’t and thus we are talking about actual systems people owned. I mean, I could list a plethora of technologies I’d have preferred to dominate: Pascal and LISP being two big examples. But the C64 wasn’t a lisp machine and people aren’t writing modern software in Pascal. So they’re completely moot to the conversation.