EuroForth 2022

Invitation section

Please note:
After talking to participants we decided to make this the last virtual EuroForth conference.
Next year's EuroForth will be face to face with eating, drinking and laughing again.

Online, 16.-18. September 2022

The 38th EuroForth conference takes place in the Internet.

Please see the official call for papers for instructions on how to submit papers.

Colosseum / CC BY-SA 2.0 Bert Kaufmann / Edited by Gerald Wodni

The conference will be preceded by the Forth standards meeting which starts on September, 14th.

Both, meeting and conference will be hosted online.

Programme

PROGRAMME

Hardware requirements

The following hardware is required:

• A headset or another setup which ensures no echoing is received from your end.

You cannot attend the conference with a built-in microphone. If you cannot get a headset and cause interference, you will be muted and will be limited to replying by text.

The following hardware is strongly recommended:

• A webcam which points at your face
• A lamp which illuminates your face.

If there is a wall behind your monitor consider bouncing light of it with a lamp, so we can see your lovely face. Alternatively shine light onto you from an angle.

Software requirements

TL;DR: get Firefox, sign up at the link you will be getting via registration email (opens 19th August 2021).

The following software is required:

• Fairly recent Firefox browser (please update when possible)

The following software is strongly recommended as a fallback option:

• Fairly recent Chromium based browser (please update when possible)
• Zoom Client

Like last year we will be using the web-based chat-application Mattermost at https://chat.forth-standard.org - no installation required, hosted by Forth Committee Members to help privacy concerns. You will receive a signup link in via email after you registered on this site. All communication is within this chat-application, we ask you to sign in within the Get together timeframe.

For the video conferences themselfes we will be using BigBlueButton hosted by Gerald Wodni, as senfcall.de was dropping some connections from the US. Links to the conference rooms will be provided in chat-application Mattermost.

If this should fail we will fall back to Zoom. Consider installing their client beforehand.

Please visit our testing call which will be announced in chat, especially if you had issues last year.

Forth standard meeting

Click here for Programme

EuroForth conference

Click here for Programme

Program section

EuroForth 2022

Programme

Forth standard meeting

Times are converted to your local timezone indicated by a blue background, if you have javascript enabled (no, this cannot be done server-side).
Otherwise UTC(+0) will be displayed and you have to calculate the offset yourself.

Wednesday, 14th September UTC(+0)

• 14:30 Get together - Setup your gear and smalltalk
• 14:50 Call to order - get ready (please be online by now)
• 15:00 Session 1
• 17:00 Bio Break
• 17:15 Session 2
• 19:00 End of main session

Thursday, 15th September UTC(+0)

• 14:30 Get together - Setup your gear and smalltalk
• 14:50 Call to order - get ready (please be online by now)
• 15:00 Session 3
• 17:00 Bio Break
• 17:15 Session 4
• 19:00 End of main session

EuroForth conference

on air ... these session are streamed live on twitch, recorded and shared on youtube for future generations to enjoy and to rewatch

Friday, 16th September UTC(+0)

• 13:00 Get together - Setup your gear and smalltalk
• 13:50 Call to order - get ready (please be online by now)
• 14:00 Welcome and Introduction
• 14:30 Session 1 on air
  • Nick Nelson: Better Values (30min)
    Improvements to the implementation of the extended Forth VALUE concept
  • Ulrich Hoffmann: Fuzzing Forth (45min)
    Fuzzing is an automatic testing strategy that can be used to increase the reliability of applications.
    Application interfaces are tested with selected random (fuzzed) arguments in order to uncover implementation problems.
    The talk will explain various building blocks for fuzz testing, namely corectness notions, generators, mutators, sanitizers, among others, and see how Forth applications can benefit from fuzzing.
• 15:45 BioBreak
• 16:05 Session 2 on air
  • M. Anton Ertl: Memory Safety Without Tagging nor Static Type Checking (45min)
    A significant proportion of vulnerabilities are due to memory accesses
    (typically in C code) that memory-safe languages like Java prevent.
    This talk discusses a new approach to modifying Forth for
    memory-safety: Eliminate addresses from the data stack; instead, put
    object references on a separate object stack and use
    value-flavoured words. This approach avoids the complexity of
    static type checking (used in, e.g., Java and Factor), and also avoids
    the performance overhead of dynamic type checking for non-memory
    operations.
  • Krishna Myneni: Progress Towards Porting EISPACK to Forth (40min)
    I will give an update on my status of porting EISPACK, the old Fortran package for obtaining numerical solutions of eigensystems problems, to standard Forth. I will describe the rationale behind porting this particular package, instead of a modern package like LAPACK, give an overview of the library modules present in EISPACK, and talk about some of the challenges in porting unstructured Fortran 77 code to current Forth and in testing both the original and ported code. Examples of use in Forth will be presented, for those modules which have already been ported.
• 17:30 End of presentations, start of work shops

Saturday, 17th September UTC(+0)

• 13:00 Get together - Setup your gear and smalltalk
• 13:50 Call to order - get ready
• 14:00 Session 3 on air
  • Andrew Read: Can I do this in Forth? (45min)
    A modern instrumentation control and data analysis application is astroimaging at amateur and semiprofessional observatories. A case for Forth software raises interesting questions!
  • Glyn Faulkner: Tales from the Left-Hand Path: Dark Confessions of a Forth Hobbyist (40min)
    Question: What happens when you combine an unhealthy Forth obsession with a background in programming language implementation and a perverse liking for the GNU assembler?
    Answer: Nothing good or wholesome...
• 15:25 BioBreak
• 15:40 Session 4 on air
  • Klaus Schleisiek: German Academia and Forth (20min)
    A report on the 38th Workshop der GI-Fachgruppe "Programmiersprachen und Rechenkonzepte"
  • Virtual Excursion: your favourite technical gadget (30min)
    introduce us to your favourite technical thingy you need us to know about in 1 minute.
    Feel free to take something obvious at the risk of having somebody else with the same gadget or pick such a specialized tool who's explanation makes our brain hurt.
    Please upload 1-3 images into the mattermost channel prior to this deadline "virtual excursion".
• 16:30 Cooking/Ordering formal Dinner
• 18:00 Formal dinner with open chat, followed by work shops

Sunday, 18th September UTC(+0)

• 13:00 Get together - Setup your gear and smalltalk

• 13:50 Call to order - get ready

• 14:00 Session 5 on air

  • Bernd Paysan: Gforth 1.0 (30min)
    Gforth is getting closer and closer to the 1.0 release; time to report what changes.
  • Klaus Schleisiek: uCore progress (20min)
    byte addressing and complete division/multiplication test

• 14:50 BioBreak

• 15:05 Session 6 (Impromptu Talks) on air

  • Ulrich Hoffmann: Standard Report (10min)
    What has been discussed in the just past standard's meeting?

  • Leon Wagner: Tracking celestial bodies with a satellite antenna (2min)
    We added celestial body tracking to our fast antenna controllers last year, primarily for tracking the moon. During testing, we strapped a webcam to an antenna mount and tracked the moon from rise to set in the sky over Fresno, California. I'll show the time-lapse video of this.

  • Gerald Wodni: VFX Future / more TUI (15min)
    Wodni & Pelc is already up & running, VFX is receiving new TUI tools

  • Nate Morse: Joy to the Web: A Zero Install version of Joy (not a production) Language called Pounce (5min)
    l could not get the "Joy language" to run on my hardware, so I started making interpreters (as one does). In the process of making interpreters, choices are made that deviated from "pure" Joy. I love the Forth way, and I am enamored by functional programming, so I followed Joy -> Cat -> Kitten, which lead me to make this browser based language, Pounce. Pounce has zero state outside of the stack and the program queue (dequeue), see https://pounce-lang-show-case.netlify.app/ and https://github.com/pounce-lang

  • Bob Armstrong: CoSy ` NoteComuting environment demo (15min)
    Brief demo of CoSy environment which I use every day as a timestamped diary/log & to doing my accounting and mail_list handling .
    CoSy is a Vocabulary in open Forth implementing reference counted dynamic lists very much modeled on Arthur Whitney's K , evolved from Ken Iverson's APL . Indexing is Modulo .

  • M. Anton Ertl: Are locals inevitably slow? (15min)
    Code quality of locals on two code examples on various systems

  • Ulrich Hoffmann: Enums in Forth (10min)
    How can we define Enums in Forth? Let's look at best practice and alternatives.

  • Nick Nelson: Resource embedding in Forth (10min)
    How we put icons, images, UI definitions, CSS styling sheets etc. into our Forth executables.

  • Howerd Oakford: colorForth (0min)

  • Nick Nelson: Lightning Talk (10min)

  • A fellow Forther: Lightning Talks (10min)

• 16:47 TBA

• 17:30 End of EuroForth 2022