Tumble Forth

Tumble Forth

Hello, my name is Virgil Dupras, author of Collapse OS and Dusk OS and I'm starting a series of articles that<br>aims to hand-hold my former self, a regular web developer, into the rabbit hole<br>leading to the wonderful world of low level programming. Hopefully, I can<br>hand-hold you too.

The general goal is to broaden your perspectives on the subject of computing. I<br>intend do to that through story arcs leading, step by step, to some nice and<br>shiny objective. I also intend to work into a gimmick where in each episode, I<br>get to tell one corny joke.

The target reader is a person who knows their way around programming, but is<br>inexperienced in the area of low level programming. If you're the target reader<br>but find some parts of this content difficult to understand, this is not<br>intentional. In this case, or if you have any question or comment, reach out to<br>me at hsoft@hardcoded.net.

Story arcs

Buckle up, Dorothy

In my “pilot” story arc, we peek in<br>disgust in the abyss of modern software complexity and escape this dystopia by<br>tumbling down the rabbit hole of low level development.

Starting from bare metal on the PC platform, we build a Forth from scratch, then<br>switch to Dusk OS and then build a partial C<br>compiler (just enough to compile our example code), again from scratch.

Table of Contents

Buckle up, Dorothy

Liberation through bare metal

One sector to rule them all

Words in the shell

Do Look Up

A tale of two stacks

Baby's first steps

The Unbearable Immediateness of Compiling

From Dusk Till C

Feeding the beast

In the Eye of the Compiler