Erich, Thanks for all your work.
You may wish to advertise the vacancy on the USENET comp.lang.forth. A G account will do the job. On Fri, 06 May 2022 09:17:23 +0200 Erich Wälde <ew.fo...@nassur.net> wrote: > Dear AmForthers, > > I am herewith stepping down from the maintainer role of AmForth. For > details, read on. If anyone is interested to take over, get in touch > with me. > > > In 2020 I received the logins of amforth.sourceforge.net, basically > because I was lucky enough to have met Matthias personally a few > times. At that time I had a lot of ideas on how to proceed. And while > I managed to create an official release, there are a few obstacles in > this path. > > First and foremost I am facing a health issue. It is subtle, but it > seriously limits, what I can do. I still have to make several > difficult decisions regarding my daily life. I have started to > decrease the number of things on my list by cancelling items. I have > to accept the fact, that I'm not in a position any more to advance > the AmForth project in a meaningful way. > > Secondly, AmForth has become complex over time. Matthias added > support for three more target platforms (msp430, arm, riscv32). > Allthough access to these is easily achievable, I use only avr. And I > use it less these days. > > Thirdly, AmForths tools are depending heavily on python code, a > language I consider myself illiterate in. I have written a few small > perl scripts around AmForth to serve my needs. I heavily depend on > those and on a Makefile. > > Add the fact, that in 2020 I spent countless hours to port my data > acquisition stuff at home from amforth 4.6 to 6.9 and it just did not > become stable. To this day I still have no clue, why the thing hangs > itself after some time, sometimes hours, sometimes several days. In > other words: unusable. > > > Step back: what would I have done, if I didn't know Matthias, and the > project would just have become silent? Simplify. Simplify heavily. > > Very recently I have made a fork of AmForth release 5.0. That version > is before support for msp430 was officially added (5.5). That version > happens to compile with avra rather than wine/avrasm2.exe. Along the > way I found, that avra has seen new releases, which add support for > my beloved atmega644p and lots of fixes, which is nice! This removes > the dependancy from wine and allows for smaller systems for > development. > > So I have picked up my data acquisition project again with the fork > mentioned above. Any Interrupt Service Routines are written in > assembly to avoid the thing that I uncovered in 2017, namely a race > condition 1 bit wide and 1 instruction cycle long. I pick missing > bits and pieces from later releases. I would like to add a few > features regarding sensors with different needs. A first experiment > has run more than 10^6s (12d) without any failure. So I am moderately > optimistic to continue along this simplified path. > > > Thanks to all, who have answered the list, contributed code, ideas, > documentation in one form or other. It has been an interesting > experience. And should you still care to listen: if you have one or a > few more important plans, do not delay them, you might be unable to > pursue them later. > > Happy hacking, and use the Forth! > > Cheers > Erich > -- Regards, Martin Nicholas. E-mail: m...@mgn.org.uk. _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
