this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html

Permacomputing XMPP Chat

Sister community over at lemmy.sdf.org: !permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

There's also a wiki: https://permacomputing.net/

Website: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html

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Is forth THE language of permacomputing? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 day ago by Cassette_Punk_2045@slrpnk.net to c/permacomputing@slrpnk.net
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I’m new to the community and a relatively new programmer, as well. I’m very comfortable with C and the command line. But, do I need to start studying Forth to really contribute?

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[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 4 points 19 hours ago

Collapse OS – Why Forth? – but I think most of the concatenative languages would be just as flexible, like Factor or Uxn

I would think C would work as long as you restrict it to a minimal base set: c89 -Wall -Werror -Wpedantic – or be brave and use -nostdlib – but keep in mind, C was a mainframe language, it only later got adopted for microcomputers and then microcontrollers

but aside from those, you are looking for a language that:

  • doesn’t require a lot of resources (power, memory, or storage)
  • can be bootstrapped relatively easily: sectorForth, milliForth, sectorLisp, uLisp, Uxn
  • has enough existing code (and community) to learn from (and isn’t some grad project that was abandoned after post-graduation)
  • but also doesn’t have so much code that it’s now synonymous with lake-burning scrapers fouling the waters
  • can run in constrained environments: commodity microcontrollers, 8-bit processors
  • can be compiled in those same constrained environments (being able to bootstrap it rather than needing a server farm to cross compile it)