wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (12/18/90)
If we really want a good Forth chip at a low price, rather than spending our time designing Yet Another Forth Engine to be implemented in an inappropriate technology (FPGA), we should throw our support behind one of the existing designs. Chuck Moore, John Hayes, Marty Fraeman, Phil Koopman, and Charles Johnson are all very bright people, and they have spent a lot of time designing, debugging, and optimizing their Forth chips. It is unlikely that we would be able to "leapfrog" them and come up with something better and cheaper, even if our development costs are subsidized (in other words, a public domain project). I bet that native code generation and software optimization techiques (as used in, for example, HS Forth) applied to a 25 MHz 286 chip would result in better performance at lower cost than would be achieved by an FPGA Forth engine. Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM