After putting in a lot of work on the
2023 Project Goals for my presentation at
HHC 2023, I decided to take a break and work on a few other things for a while. One of those things is a chatbot that connects to IRC and runs Forth code it receives from users. My inspiration for this is the
geordi bot which evaluates C code and also runs on IRC. Testing short programs and showing the results immediately is really useful to demonstrate language concepts. Although my Forth chatbot was a really fun project to work on and taught me a lot about several different technologies, I decided not to finish it in the end.
The chatbot is split into two parts. The main program is a Python script that connects to IRC, handles communication, and runs the terminal interface that manages the bot. The second part is a shared library written in C that the Python script loads and calls into to run the Forth code submitted by users. The library is written in C to maximize performance.
