79 lines
3.3 KiB
Text
79 lines
3.3 KiB
Text
## RETRO 11 (2011 - 2019): A Look Back
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So it's now been about five years since the last release of RETRO
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11. While I still see some people obtaining and using it, I've
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moved on to the twelth generation of RETRO. It's time for me to
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finally retire RETRO 11.
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As I prepare to do so, I thought I'd take a brief look back.
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RETRO 11 began life in 2011. It grew out of RETRO 10, which was
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the first version of RETRO to not be written in x86 assembly
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language. For R10 and R11, I wrote a portable virtual machine
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(with numerous implementations) and the Forth dialect was kept
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in an image file which ran on the VM.
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RETRO 10 worked, but was always a bit too sloppy and changed
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drastically between releases. The major goal of RETRO 11 was to
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provide a stable base for a five year period. In retrospect,
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this was mostly achieved. Code from earlier releases normally
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needed only minor adjustments to run on later releases, though
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newer releases added significantly to the language.
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There were seven releases.
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- Release 11.0: 2011, July
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- Release 11.1: 2011, November
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- Release 11.2: 2012, January
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- Release 11.3: 2012, March
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- Release 11.4: 2012, July
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- Release 11.5: 2013, March
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- Release 11.6: 2014, August
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Development was fast until 11.4. This was the point at which I
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had to slow down due to RSI problems. It was also the point
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which I started experiencing some problems with the metacompiler
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(as discussed previously).
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RETRO 11 was flexible. All colon definitions were setup as hooks,
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allowing new functionality to be layered in easily. This allowed
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the later releases to add things like vocabularies, search order,
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tab completion, and keyboard remapping. This all came at a cost
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though: later things could use the hooks to alter behavior of
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existing words, so it was necessary to use a lot of caution to
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ensure that the layers didn't break the earlier code.
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The biggest issue was the I/O model. RETRO 11 and the Ngaro VM
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assumed the existence of a console environment. All input was
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required to be input at the keyboard, and all output was to be
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shown on screen. This caused some problems. Including code from
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a file required some tricks, temporarily rewriting the keyboard
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input function to read from the file. It also became a major
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issue when I wrote the iOS version. The need to simulate the
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keyboard and console complicated everything and I had to spend
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a considerable amount of effort to deal with battery performance
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resulting from the I/O polling and wait states.
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But on the whole it worked well. I used RETRO 11.6 until I started
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work on RETRO 12 in late 2016, and continued running some tools
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written in R11 until the first quarter of last year.
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The final image file was 23,137 cells (92,548 bytes). This was
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bloated by keeping some documentation (stack comments and short
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descriptions) in the image, which started in 11.4. This contained
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269 words.
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I used RETRO 11 for a wide variety of tasks. A small selection of
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things that were written includes:
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- a pastebin
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- front end to ii (irc client)
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- small explorations of interactive fiction
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- irc log viewer
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- tool to create html from templates
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- tool to automate creation of an SVCD from a set of photos
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- tools to generate reports from data sets for my employer
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In the end, I'm happy with how RETRO 11 turned out. I made some
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mistakes in embracing too much complexity, but despite this it
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was a successful system for many years.
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