Alternatives
Products that do what 10biForthOS a full 8086 OS in 46 bytes does
10biForthOS = 10b(2) i(nstructions) Forth OS is a very primitive Forth with only two instructions: 1 is compile 0 is execute It is heavily inspired by Frank Sergeant 3-Instruction Forth (https://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html)
- 1FA
2017 · bitbucket.org
- 23Y
2024 · github.com
- 3PB
2021 · github.com
- 4MM
Hi HN, I’m Dvir, a young developer. Last year, I got rejected after a job interview because I lacked some CPU knowledge. After that, I decided to deepen my understanding in the low level world and learn how things work under the hood. I decided to try and create an OS in C and ASM as a way to broaden my knowledge in this area. This took me on the most interesting ride, where I’ve learned about OS theory and low level programming on a whole new level. I’ve spent hours upon hours, blood and tears, reading different OS theory blogs, learning low level concepts, debugging, testing and working on…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 5IM
https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth Hi HN! For the past year I've been getting into programming in Z80 assembly (especially for the TI-84+). More recently I've been learning about the Forth programming language and after a lot of searching online (in vain) for a Forth interpreter for the TI-84, I decided to write one myself. It's been fun demoing this to others, because it's a very unexpected use of a calculator. It's my largest project to date, and I'm interested to know what the HN community thinks, please feel free to critique my code! -- Ben
2018
- 6BA
This is ymawky, a static file web server for MacOS written entirely in ARM64 assembly. It supports GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests, and supports Range: bytes=X-Y headers (which allows scrubbing for video streaming). It decodes percent-encoded URLs, strictly enforces docroot, serves custom error pages for any HTTP error response, supports directory listing, and has (some) mitigations against slowloris-like attacks. I’ve also written a more detailed writeup here: https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/
May 2026 · github.com
- 7IM
https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80 As a successor to my previous project[1], a Forth interpreter that runs under the TI operating system, I decided to go all the way and write my own assembler and OS. This is a project I've been working on for just over a month, but there's still a long way to go. The idea is to have a kernel + the Forth interpreter and compiler, then users can modify how their operating system works through the Forth files. My Forth implementation is mostly ANS-standard conforming, so most code should work right out of the box without any problem. See…
2019
- 8IM
I've wanted to make my own OS since I started programming. Now, 5 years later, I did it (kind of). Sure, it is really basic, has very little functionality, but I made it and I'm proud of that. Oh, and I'm just 16 btw.
2025 · jotalea.com.ar
- 9AN
The core question: how did HP's scientific calculators actually work at the gate level? That rabbit hole led to building one from scratch. The architectural decision everything else follows from: a decimal calculator should store numbers as BCD — one decimal digit per 4-bit nibble. A standard byte-oriented CPU (Z80, 6502) fights that layout constantly. So I designed a small custom CPU in Verilog where 4 bits is the natural data width and memory is nibble addressable. What the project covers: - Custom CPU: Harvard architecture, 12-bit ISA, 8-state execution FSM, hardware stack guard with a…
May 2026 · github.com
- 10OA
(sorry about double posting, I forgot to put Show HN in front in the original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863689 thread) Hey all, As a follow up to my relatively successful series in x86 Assembly of last year[1], I started making an OS that fits in a boot sector. I am purposefully not doing chain loading or multi-stage to see how much I can squeeze out of 510bytes. It comes with a file system, a shell, and a simple process management. Enough to write non-trivial guest applications, like a text editor and even some games. It's a lot of fun! It comes with an SDK and…
2025 · github.com
- 11BO
This is my operating system that I've been working for the past 2 years. All of the code is written exclusively by me except from ported software. banan-os has a monolithic kernel targeting x86 (i686) and x86_64 architectures. The project consists of bootloader, kernel and userspace libraries (libc, libGUI, libFont, ...). It also uses my custom C++ standard library partly based on stdc++. Currently I have basic TTY and GUI environment with some of the basic UNIX utilities like cp, ls and stat. I have basic support for USB (keyboard/mouse/storage), disks (NVMe, AHCI), custom…
2024 · github.com
- 12AM
2024 · github.com
- 13IB
This weekend I created stacklib.h - a single-header library that brings Forth-style stack operations to C. It implements a basic interpreter with: - Stack operations (push/pop/dup/swap/over/drop) - Arithmetic (+, -, *, /) - Output (., emit, cr) - Stack inspection (.s, depth) Example usage: Stack s; stack_init(&s); dict_init(); exec(&s, "10 20 + ."); // Prints "30" exec(&s, "1 2 3 4 .s"); // Shows stack contents The library is self-contained, requires no dependencies, and handles basic error checking. It was inspired by wanting to understand…
Sep 2025
- 14BA
I've built many interpreters over the years, and Bolt represents my attempt at building the scripting language I always wanted. This is the first public release, 0.1.0! I've felt like most embedded languages have been moving towards safety and typing over years, with things like Python type hints, the explosive popularity of typescript, and even typing in Luau, which powers one of the largest scripted evironments in the world. Bolt attempts to harness this directly in the lagnauge rather than as a preprocessing step, and reap benefits in terms of both safety and performance. I intend to be…
2025 · github.com
- 15IW
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 16H1
This is a 16bit CPU+Minicomputer from pure 74 series logic. It has user/kernel modes, virtual memory, prioritized IRQ's and DMA. It has a full C compiler and a unix-like OS. It's still in development.
2023 · sol-1.org
- 17AM
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 18BA
Hey everyone, this is my latest project. Bedrock is a lightweight program runtime: programs assemble down to a few kilobytes of bytecode that can run on any computer, console, or handheld. The runtime is tiny, it can be implemented from scratch in a few hours, and the I/O devices for accessing the keyboard, screen, networking, etc. can be added on as needed. I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer. It's deeply inspired by Uxn and PICO-8, but it makes significant departures from Uxn to provide more capabilities to programs and to be easier to…
2025 · benbridle.com
- 19

- 20GA
Hello HN, I've been working on a simple OS for tinkering and running bare metal apps on vintage PCs. Since I couldn't quite decide whether to target pure 16-bit, or slightly more capable 32-bit machines, I ended up with two separate versions: - GentleOS/32 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32) works on i386+, requires 4MB of RAM and VGA display supporting 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode. - GentleOS/16 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos) works on 80186+, requires less than 192KB of RAM and a CGA display supporting 320x200x4…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 21PA
2021 · github.com
- 22

- 23CW
Hello HN, This is a project of mine which contains a working, self-hosting, Forth interpreter for a single instruction machine. The instruction is called "SUBLEQ", short for (SUB)tract and branch if (L)ess than or (EQ)ual. Everything has to be synthesized from that instruction, bitwise operators have to be implemented in terms of repeated subtraction and self modifying code used to create indirect loads and stores. In doing this it is possible to port a working language that is capable of generating new images for the machine. It's possible to play with it online at:…
2023 · github.com
- 24TF
2016 · transcrypt.org
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