I like the story behind your project a lot! Since you're using e4thcom some of Manfred Marlow's approaches to the little Forth I'm maintaining might also be useful for your Forth. Also it's quite possible that my codeload.py works with minor adaptations :-)

The main adaptation that would be needed is that it would need to wait until it receives ACK to send another line of code, and it would need to treat NAK as an indicator of an error indicating to stop ending any more data. This is why with e4thcom it is used in noforth mode, because noforth behaves in this fashion.

I remember I had a long discussion with Manfred about ACK/NACK vs. OK/? - he didn't like the solution he made for noforth too much and made a point of using the "human readable" handshake with OK and ? (for error). What's your reason for using ACK/NACK?

My reason to do ACK and NAK is that it would signal success versus failure without relying on the textual content of what is output - in zeptoforth an exception can really result in anything being output while ACK and NAK could be transparently added to all prompts and all errors without any further changes being necessary - and there was a premade mode in e4thcom to use ACK and NAK.

(Note that I am responding to this post because hackaday.io is not letting me reply to your other post.)

I didn't notice your reply, sorry. Hint: in HaD discussions you can simply reply to the post someone else replied to.

OK, now I understand your preferences. When I started this I first tried to work with an XON/XOFF handshake, at least until I figured the following out about USB-serial converters on Linux: https://github.com/neundorf/CuteCom/issues/22 

Personally I would prefer hardware flow control, but unfortunately the USB-serial dongle I am using to communicate with the STM32F407 DISCOVERY board lacks pins for RTS/CTS, and the serial over USB connection built into the STM32L476 DISCOVERY board has no option for hardware flow control in the first place.

I looked at the code for codeload.py and noticed that is coded for Python 2.7, which is no longer maintained. Could you do a port for Python 3? This could be very useful for people who do not run Linux (and thus e4thcom is not a feasible option, as apparently people have not had luck with FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer with it). (I could add more screen support for also adding XON and XOFF, but screen still would not support loading files from within other files with anything like #include or #require.)

Sure I can port it to Python 3 :-) To be honest, when I wrote it I didn't know much Python and 2.7 was the default on the Ubuntu 14.04 I was using then.

Do you know of anyone who uses the e4thcom 64bit binary on WSL 2?

I have not heard of anyone trying 64-bit e4thcom with WSL 2, but then, I have not heard of anyone who has used WSL 2 in the first place. Most of the people I know in #forth on freenode are either Linux (and not Linux on top of Windows) or BSD users.

I gave it a try. It appears to work but it's not fully tested:

https://gist.github.com/TG9541/0b48bd49854cc865469515697b5185f6

I tried telnet to ucSim with the python3 variant - Python3 "byte array vs. str"  issues, of coursed. Unfortunately I get timeouts after fixing it. That's very difficult to debug. The serial interface transfer, which is likely the one you're most interested in, should work anyway.

Could you add a copyright notice and license block to codeload3.py so I can incorporate it, with some minor modifications, to the zeptoforth codebase? I should note that there is no such thing as the public domain in Germany.

Sure, I'll do that. MIT is OK, I s'pose?

Edit: done

That would work, particularly since the MIT license is GPL-compatible.

I put my changes to codeload3.py to make it work with zeptoforth in my fork of your gist, and I will include this with zeptoforth so users can upload code without relying on e4thcom.

Cool!  Going to have to check this out.  

Lemme see if I have a 407 Disco around here somewhere...

I agree that Forth misses lambdas, just b/c it's hard to think up good names all the time.    

Although on multitasking/timers, honestly, I end up just writing "begin do_something 100 ms again", which works as well, if your "ms" definition has a "yield" in it.  But this keeps the chip from going into a low-power mode, b/c it's always round-robinning into delay statements.  If the scheduler knew...  

So yeah.  I'm going to have a peek at your multitasking setup.

I would appreciate more people trying it out, even though that requires their owning the same hardware as myself. (It is hard for me to maintain the code for hardware I do not own, e.g. I cannot create zeptoforth_full binaries without physically owning the hardware in question.)

Lambdas are a feature missing, unfortunately, from most Forths, even though there are a few with them, such as Retro (of course Retro is not a conventional Forth by any means).

The multitasker is designed to put the MCU to sleep when no task is actively executing, even though it wakes up the processor when a SysTick occurs, when a byte is received over a USART, or, if data is pending in the serial TX circular buffer and the USART TX shift register becomes free. So if one writes:

: foo begin do-baz 100 ms again ;

' foo 256 256 256 spawn constant foo-task

foo-task task-enable

it will sleep the MCU, aside from it getting woken up by SysTicks and by any input the user feeds into the REPL.

You said you might try it out on the F407. If you had any problems with the zeptoforth_full-[version].bin file for the F407, there were issues with it being corrupt, so try it out with the latest release binaries, where I made sure to check that it now works.

Could you explain why vs mecrisp?

Re M0, you say "it relies on key features of the Thumb-2 instruction set which are missing from the Thumb-2 instruction set". Could you clarify?

To be completely honest, it fits much of the same niche as Mecrisp-Stellaris, but there being one Forth for a platform has not stopped anyone from making another (e.g. there already was a Cortex-M Forth before Mecrisp-Stellaris, namely Riscy Pygness). This project exists largely because I wanted to create a bare-metal native code embedded Forth of my own, and the STM32L4 and STM32F4 series microcontrollers were an attractive target, big enough to fit a good-sized Forth with plenty of room to spare, with good documentation for peripherals, and without being effectively a PC on a chip (e.g. the Raspberry Pi boards) with peripherals that may require proprietary binary blobs and thus not amenable to development by an individual such as myself.

About the M0, the issue is that 32-bit literals are difficult to implement without 16-bit low and 16-bit high immediate MOV/MOVT instructions, and while I tried to implement literals that use a mixture of MOVS, LSLS, and ORRS instructions the problem is that when allocating space for a literal ahead of time, and then writing to it later, it is hard to predict how long that sequence of instructions will be (unless one assumes the very longest length and then fills out the rest of the space with NOPs). So as a result I am focusing on Cortex-M3/M4 for now, and will  implement support for the Cortex-M0 later if I see the need for it.

Looking into M4 because of the dsp floating point performance. So 4th for the little F411 dip boards would be ok with me.  Interesting how to integrate Forth with the arm dsp libraries though.

Amazing