February 6, 2026
Caps vs stacks: pick your fighter
Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM
Tiny retro coding toy wows devs, revives nostalgia, and ignites a caps‑lock debate
TLDR: R3forth is a tiny, retro-inspired coding tool that runs fast and shows off slick graphics through SDL2. Commenters loved the minimal vibe and nostalgia, but debated single-thread limits and quirky capitalized commands—proof that even a 40kb toy can stir big feelings in dev land.
R3forth, a minimalist, self-hosted stack language inspired by ColorForth, crash‑landed on Hacker News and instantly split the crowd into three camps: hype squad, retro archaeologists, and caps‑police. Fans cheered the tiny ~40kb virtual machine and bold demos, while nostalgia surged as 13415 marveled that Mike Hore’s Powermops is “still around” and even on ARM, dropping a link like a time portal. Curious minds prodded the edges: alexisread asked if it’s single‑threaded and not multi‑process—translation: does this tiny engine juggle many tasks or keep it simple? That question set off a vibe check on R3forth’s “zero bloat” philosophy versus modern expectations of parallel everything. Then thristian lit the caps‑lock fuse: why do some commands shout (SDLinit) while others whisper (sdlcls)? The naming style became the day’s mini‑drama.
On the “show me the goods” side, ripe swooned over the SDL2 graphics—sprites, tiles, fonts—basically a pocket arcade. The “red box in the corner” sample became the new Hello World, proving this toy can paint pixels fast. With built‑in editors, a self‑hosted compiler, and instant run loops, commenters joked this feels like a retro console for code. And yes, you can load native libraries and ship games—itch.io receipts included.
Key Points
- •R3forth is a minimalist, ColorForth-inspired stack machine language and environment with a tiny C-based VM (~40KB) supporting Windows and Linux.
- •The system can load procedures from dynamic libraries (DLL/SO) and uses SDL2 for graphics, with libraries for 2D sprites, tilemaps, fonts, animations, and advanced logic including a 3D engine and immgui.
- •R3forth offers both an integrated IDE (auto-loading main.r3) and a CLI workflow compatible with editors like Emacs, Vim, and Notepad++, compiling and executing scripts quickly.
- •Linux setup requires SDL2 development libraries; users can run a precompiled binary or build from source via the r3evm GitHub repository. Windows users can run r3.exe from a downloaded ZIP without installation.
- •The project includes documented folder structure, demos and videos, and references games available on itch.io, with additional documentation in the /doc directory.