40th EuroForth 2024

Invitation section

Newcastle Upon Tyne, 27.-29. September 2024

The 40th EuroForth conference takes place at Leonardo's Hotel Gateshead Quays, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

This years EuroForth will be held in the vibrant city of Newcastle upon Tyne. We will be situated in the dramatic post industrial landsape of the quayside, adjacent to the Baltic Art Gallery (a re-purposed flour mill) and the futuristic Sage music venue. The Millenium Footbrige leads across the river to the Newcastle Quayside, where we can find an assortment of international restaraunts.

For partners who have time to explore the town, there is an electric bus service up to the Georgian heart of Newcastle with its monument of Earl Grey, the prime minister who managed to find time, between drinking cups of tea, to oversee the passage of the Great Reform Act and the Abolition of Slavery Act. Nearby are the Laing Art Gallery, the Theatre Royal, and the historic Grainger Market. Right by Grey's Monument, the Eldon Square Shopping Centre houses the famous Newcastle department store Fenwicks, in addition to John Lewis and Marks and Spencer. Newcastle is within easy reach of the coast and countryside. Jesmond Dene Park offers a beautiful wooded valley in the heart of town.

Programme

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

The conference will be preceded by the Forth standards meeting which starts on September, 25th.

Both, meeting and conference will be hosted in the Leonardo Hotel Newcastle Quayside.

Hotel

There are two Leonardo Hotels in Newcastle upon Tyne, make sure to go to "Quayside" (see Google Maps).

Programme

Forth standard meeting

Wednesday, 25th September 14:00 - Friday, 27th September 12:00

EuroForth conference

Friday, 27th September 14:00 - Sunday, 29th September 12:00

Saturday: Excursion

Will be organized and announced on site, partners welcome!

Bank Transfer

Important: The organisers are asking to please wire the amount in full and pay all fees on the senders end. If you can please select GBP as the designated currency. If not all of the money arrives please be ready to pay the remainder in cash on site.

Program section

40th EuroForth 2024

Programme

Please Note: This is a preliminary programme and subject to change.

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, 25th September UTC(+0)

• 13:00 Session 1
• 15:00 Coffee Break
• 15:15 Session 2
• 17:00 End of main sessions
• Workshops

Thursday, 26th September UTC(+0)

• 08:30 Session 4
• 09:30 Coffee Break
• 09:45 Session 5
• 11:15 Lunch
• 12:30 Session 6
• 14:45 Coffee Break
• 15:00 Session 7
• 17:00 End of main sessions
• Workshops

Friday, 26th September UTC(+0)

• 08:30 Session 9
• 09:30 Coffee Break
• 09:45 Session 10
• 11:00 End of Standards Meeting

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, 27th September UTC(+0)

• 13:00 Session 1 on air
  • M. Anton Ertl: How to Implement Words (Efficiently) (45min)
    The implementation of Forth words has to satisfy the following requirements: 1) A word must be represented by a single cell (for EXECUTE). 2) A word may represent a combination of code and data (for, e.g., DOES>). In addition, on some hardware, keeping executed native code and (written) data close together results in slowness and therefore should be avoided; moreover, failing to pair up calls with returns results in (slow) branch mispredictions. The present work describes how various Forth systems over the decades have satisfied the requirements, and how many systems run into performance pitfalls in various situations. This paper also discusses how to avoid this slowness, including in native-code systems.
  • Nick Nelson: A Forth binding for GTK4 (45min)
    For some years, a Forth binding to major version 3 of the widely used graphical user interface toolkit GTK has been available. The major version 4 of GTK introduces
    many incompatibilities, so that a completely different approach to the binding is needed. It will be shown how the unique features of Forth can be leveraged to overcome the difficulties introduced by GTK4.
• 14:30 BioBreak
• 14:50 Session 2 on air
  • Francois Laagel: Pac-man for the DEC VT420 (30min)
    Pac-man was a graphical game designed in 1979 by a team of five people and implemented in Z80 assembly language over the course of seventeen months. This presentation will be a first person evolutionary account of my own Forth implementation in ANS94 Forth for the Digital VT420 text terminal over a three month period. The C port of the resulting application will also be covered briefly. Stress will be laid upon the value of standards and the development of ad'hoc tools.
  • Bill Stoddart: Prospective values and Forth (45min)
    We give a mathematical semantics for a reversible Forth that supports backtracking.
• 16:05 Workshops / Important night talks

Saturday, 28th September UTC(+0)

• 08:30 Session 3 on air
  • Nick Nelson: SpeechForth aka Bekki (15min)
    An idea for an alternative to touchscreens for user interfaces
  • M. Anton Ertl: The Performance Effects of Virtual-Machine Instruction Pointer Updates (2024 update) (45min)
    How much performance do VM instruction-pointer (IP) updates cost and how much benefit do we get from optimizing them away? Two decades ago it had little effect on the hardware of the day, but on recent hardware the dependence chain of IP updates can become the critical path on processors with out-of-order execution. In particular, this happens if the VM instructions are light-weight and the application programs are loop-dominated. The present work presents several ways of reducing or eliminating the dependence chains from IP updates, either by breaking the dependence chains with the l (loop) optimization or by reducing the number of IP updates (the c (combined) and ci (c and immediate) optimizations) or their latency (the b (branch) optimization). Some benchmarks see speedups from these optimizations by factors >2 on most recent cores, while other benchmarks and older cores see more modest results, often in the speedup ranges 1.1-1.3.
• 09:30 BioBreak
• 09:50 Session 4 on air
  • Gerald Wodni: Calling C from Forth automagically (45min)
    First idea close at Edinburg Conference, now nearly working
• 10:35 Excursion TBD
• Workshops

Sunday, 29th September UTC(+0)

• 08:30 Session 5 on air

  • Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET: Why another book on Forth (40min)

  • Bill Stoddart: Forth in a container (20min)
    Following suggestions given for resolving difficulties maintaining our 32 bit Forth, we now run meta-compilation in a container.

• 09:30 BioBreak
• 09:45 Session 6 on air
  • M. Anton Ertl: The new Gforth Decompiler (20min)
    ...
• 10:05 End of EuroForth Conference