Combining Forth and Rust: A Robust and Efficient Approach for Low-Level System Programming

Abstract

Rust is a modern programming language that addresses the drawbacks of earlier languages by providing features such as memory safety at compilation and high performance. Rust’s memory safety features include ownership and borrowing, which makes it an ideal choice for systems programming, where memory safety is critical. Forth is a stack-based programming language that is widely used for low-level system programming due to its simplicity and ease of use. This research paper aims to explore the combination of Forth and Rust programming languages to create a more robust and efficient solution for low-level system programming. The primary objective is to demonstrate the implementation of essential Forth operations, including addition, subtraction, assignment, comparison, and if-else statements, while demonstrating loops, push operations, and dump operations in Rust. The implementation of these operations in Rust is demonstrated using code from actual implementation. This research paper also discusses the advantages of using Rust for low-level system programming. Rust’s memory safety features, coupled with its high performance, make it an ideal choice for systems programming, where memory safety and performance are critical. The combination of Forth and Rust provides a more efficient and safer solution for low-level system programming, making the implementation more robust. Our implementation tries to leverage these properties of both languages to make a memory-safe and low-level system programming language. This research paper also includes code snippets to provide a practical demonstration of how the Forth operations can be implemented in Rust.