Forthic Go Runtime

A Go implementation of the Forthic stack-based concatenative programming language.

Overview

Forthic is a stack-based, concatenative language designed for composable transformations. This is the official Go runtime implementation, providing full compatibility with other Forthic runtimes (TypeScript, Python, Rust, Ruby, Swift, Java, Erlang, Zig, .NET).

Learn more at forthix.com →

Features

• ✅ Complete Forthic language implementation
• ✅ All 8 standard library modules
• ✅ gRPC support for multi-runtime execution
• ✅ CLI with REPL, script execution, and eval modes
• ✅ Native Go idioms (goroutines for parallelism)
• ✅ Comprehensive test suite

Installation

go get github.com/forthix/forthic-go

Usage

As a Library

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/forthix/forthic-go/forthic"
)

func main() {
    interp := forthic.NewStandardInterpreter()

    err := interp.Run("[1 2 3] \"2 *\" MAP")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    result := interp.StackPop()
    fmt.Println(result) // [2 4 6]
}

CLI

# REPL mode
forthic-go repl

# Execute a script
forthic-go run script.forthic

# Eval mode (one-liner)
forthic-go eval "[1 2 3] LENGTH"

Development

# Run tests
go test ./...

# Build
go build ./...

# Run specific test
go test -v -run TestInterpreter ./forthic

Project Structure

forthic-go/
├── forthic/              # Core runtime
│   ├── interpreter.go    # Main interpreter
│   ├── tokenizer.go      # Lexical analysis
│   ├── module.go         # Module system
│   ├── literals.go       # Literal parsers
│   └── modules/
│       └── standard/     # Standard library (8 modules)
├── grpc/                 # gRPC support
├── cmd/forthic/          # CLI tool
└── tests/                # Test suites

Standard Library Modules

• core: Stack operations, variables, control flow
• array: Data transformation (MAP, SELECT, SORT, etc.)
• record: Dictionary operations
• string: Text processing
• math: Arithmetic operations
• boolean: Logical operations
• datetime: Date/time manipulation
• json: JSON serialization

Multi-Runtime Execution

This runtime supports calling words from other Forthic runtimes via gRPC:

// Call a Python word from Go
result, err := interp.ExecuteRemoteWord("python-runtime", "MY-WORD", args)

License

BSD 2-CLAUSE

Links

• forthix.com - Learn about Forthic and Categorical Coding
• Category Theory for Coders - Understand the foundations
• Forthic Language Specification
• TypeScript Runtime (reference implementation)
• Documentation