That’s definitely an interesting idea. Thanks for sharing.

Though it means that someone down the line must have written a bootstrap programme with C/Assembler to run the host forth.

In case of jbForth, I decided to write the bootstrap too.

That’s impossible unless you’ve got a Forth machine.

Where the OS native API is accessible via C API, you’re bound to write, using C/C++/Rust/etc, a small bootstrap programme to then write your Forth on top of. That’s essentially what bjForth is at the moment: the bootstrap using JVM native API.

Currently I’m working on a set of libraries to augment the 80-something words bjForth bootstrap provides. These libraries will be, as you suggested, written in Forth not Java because they can tap into the power of JVM via the abstraction API that bootstrap primitives provide.

Hope this makes sense.

Haha…good point! That said bjForth is still a fully indirect threaded Forth. It’s just that instead of assembler and C/C++ it calls Java API to do its job.

Thanks for the pointer! Very interesting. I actually may end up doing a prototype and see how far I can get.

Thanks. Bookmarked the site. Also noted RE age.

Thanks. I’d go the online route if my kid was a few years older but given the age, I believe in-person lessons are the best for now.

Thanks. Bookmarked.

Thank you 💗

Thank you 💗

Thank you 💗

Good question!

IMO a good way to help a FOSS maintainer is to actually use the software (esp pre-release) and report bugs instead of working around them. Besides helping the project quality, I’d find it very heart-warming to receive feedback from users; it means people out there are actually not only using the software but care enough for it to take their time, report bugs and test patches.

“Announcment”

It used to be quite common on mailing lists to categorise/tag threads by using subject prefixes such as “ANN”, “HELP”, “BUG” and “RESOLVED”.

It’s just an old habit but I feel my messages/posts lack some clarity if I don’t do it 😅

What’s /s supposed to do in this context? 🤔 It looks like a Windoze/.NET command line option.

I usually capture all my development-time “automation” in Make and Ansible files. I also use makefiles to provide a consisent set of commands for the CI/CD pipelines to work w/ in case different projects use different build tools. That way CI/CD only needs to know about make build, make test, make package, … instead of Gradle/Maven/… specific commands.

Most of the times, the makefiles are quite simple and don’t need much comments. However, there are times that’s not the case and hence the need to write a line of comment on particular targets and variables.

Can you provide what you mean by check the environment, and why you’d need to do that before anything else?

One recent example is a makefile (in a subproject), w/ a dozen of targets to provision machines and run Ansible playbooks. Almost all the targets need at least a few variables to be set. Additionally, I needed any fresh invocation to clean the “build” directory before starting the work.

At first, I tried capturing those variables w/ a bunch of ifeqs, shells and defines. However, I wasn’t satisfied w/ the results for a couple of reasons:

1. Subjectively speaking, it didn’t turn out as nice and easy-to-read as I wanted it to.
2. I had to replicate my (admittedly simple) clean target as a shell command at the top of the file.

Then I tried capturing that in a target using bmakelib.error-if-blank and bmakelib.default-if-blank as below.

##############

.PHONY : ensure-variables

ensure-variables : bmakelib.error-if-blank( VAR1 VAR2 )
ensure-variables : bmakelib.default-if-blank( VAR3,foo )

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook1

ansible.run-playbook1 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook1 : 
	...

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook2

ansible.run-playbook2 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook2 : 
	...

##############

But this was not DRY as I had to repeat myself.

That’s why I thought there may be a better way of doing this which led me to the manual and then the method I describe in the post.

running specific targets or rules unconditionally can lead to trouble later as your Makefile grows up

That is true! My concern is that when the number of targets which don’t need that initialisation grows I may have to rethink my approach.

I’ll keep this thread posted of how this pans out as the makefile scales.

Even though I’ve been writing GNU Makefiles for decades, I still am learning new stuff constantly, so if someone has better, different ways, I’m certainly up for studying them.

Love the attitude! I’m on the same boat. I could have just kept doing what I already knew but I thought a bit of manual reading is going to be well worth it.

That’s a great starting point - and a good read anyways!

Thanks 🙏

Agree w/ you re trust.

Thanks. At least I’ve got a few clues to look for when auditing such code.

Oh, neat!

On another note: ~2 mins looks like rather a “long” window of maintenance/disruption for what Cloudflare is 🙈

Update 1

I reached out to the gdg folks and the blocking bugs are now fixed on main 🥳

I’ll post back here once I’ve got something working w/ gdg.