Tumble Forth

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

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

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

Code examples tarball

This blog as well as the source code that accompanies articles is available at Dusk OS' files folder (which isn't served over SSL).

Story arcs

Buckle up, Dorothy

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

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

Table of Contents

  1. Buckle up, Dorothy
  2. Liberation through bare metal
  3. One sector to rule them all
  4. Words in the shell
  5. Do Look Up
  6. A tale of two stacks
  7. Baby's first steps
  8. The Unbearable Immediateness of Compiling
  9. From Dusk Till C
  10. Feeding the beast
  11. In the Eye of the Compiler