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.

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