PLASMA 2.1 Released

[D Finnigan]

Dave Schmenk writes:

A great number of performance and reliability improvements. The big feature
update is PLFORTH, a FORTH language module for PLASMA that makes FORTH a
first class citizen to the PLASMA environment. Many on-the-metal programming
tools for software development or use PLASMA as a command line interface
with a full suite of file manipulation tools and program launcher.

VMs for 64K 6502, 128K 6502, and 128K 65802/65816 including a JIT compiler
for on-the-fly bytecode -> machine code translation. Floating point
operations by way of the 80 bit extended SANE (Standard Apple Numerics
Environment) library.

Check it out:
https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA?tab=readme-ov-file

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About PLASMA

PLASMA is a medium level programming language targeting the 8-bit 6502
processor. Historically, there were simple languages developed in the early
years of computers that improved on the tedium of assembly language
programming while still being low level enough for system coding. Languages
like B, FORTH, and PLASMA fall into this category.

PLASMA is a combination of operating environment, virtual machine, and
assembler/compiler matched closely to the 6502 architecture. It is an
attempt to satisfy a few challenges surrounding code size, efficient
execution, small runtime and flexible code location. By architecting a
unique bytecode that maps nearly one-to-one to the higher-level
representation, the compiler can be very simple and execute quickly on the
Apple II for a self-hosted environment. A modular approach provides for
incremental development and code reuse. The syntax of the language is
heavily influenced by assembly, Pascal, and C. The design philosophy was to
be as simple as feasible while retaining flexibility and semantic clarity.
You won't find any unnecessary or redundant syntax in PLASMA.