actorforth

ActorForth is Open Source software covered under BSD license (see LICENSE.txt). If you contribute to this project then you guarantee that you have the right to contribute your content & IP, will abide by said license and do assign an unlimited, universal, non-exclusive license to the copyright holder and anyone else who agrees to abide by the license.

ActorForth is a homoiconic, strongly-typed, concatenative, stack-based language with actor concurrency as a primitive, targeting the Erlang BEAM VM.

Prior implementations exist in Python 3.x (most complete — type system, compiler, product types) and C++ (partial — type system, basic interpreter) in earlier git history. The current Erlang implementation is the real one: an Erlang-hosted interpreter with native BEAM compilation, OTP integration, actor primitives, and Python interop.

See ActorForthDefinition for a quick overview of how the language works.

See Introduction to ActorForth for a comprehensive tutorial in the style of Leo Brodie's "Starting Forth."

See Implementation Plan for the full development roadmap.

Build

$ rebar3 compile

Test

$ rebar3 eunit --cover    # Run all tests with coverage
$ rebar3 ct               # Common Test suites

REPL

$ rebar3 shell
1> af_repl:start().
ActorForth REPL. ^C to exit.
ok: 42 dup + print
84

Run a script:

1> af_repl:run_file("samples/fib.a4").

Python Interop

Requires Python 3.12+ and the erlang_python hex package (included as dependency).

ok: py-start
ok: "2 + 2" py-eval
ok: print
4

See samples/python/ for example Python modules and samples/py_*.a4 for ActorForth demo scripts.