May 26, 2017

Retro 2017.5 is now released.

New features:

- Rx kernel now written in Muri assembler instead of Naje
  - Hand packed instruction encodings
  - Rewrote the `s:to-number` word
- Added `set:` vocabulary for working with simple statically sized
  arrays.
- Added `.s` to dump the stack
- Added `v:preserve` combinator

The iOS release is pending approval currently and should be out in a
couple of days. This adds more editor fixes and improvements as well
as the latest Retro image.

Get it at forthworks.com/retro/r/r12-2017.5.tar.gz

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The next release will be more interesting, especially on the iOS side.
I'm starting to expand the iOS extensions. The first new functionality
is access to the clock:

    clock:hour
    clock:minute
    clock:second
    clock:day
    clock:month
    clock:year

This opens up some possibilites in terms of being able to seed a
random number generator, or build in timing functionality for
profiling.

I am looking into adding a `json:` vocabulary for working with JSON
and some networking things. I am also starting work on a graphical
canvas for output.

On the non-iOS side, there's also some new things coming. The build
tools (Muri, Extend) now support directly processing the canonical
literate source files as does the latest RRE. This allows me to work
entirely within the Markdown + code blocks based sources and reduces
the size of the source tree by eliminating the files without
commentary.

I'd like to expand the *nix interfaces to support more of the iOS
extensions, but this may not be done for the 2016.6 release.

I'll also be continuing work on adding more sample code and writing
better documentation.

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For non-Retro things:

I'm continuing to work with Gopher protocol. My server now mirrors
the clog irc logs for #retro and #forth on irc.freenode.net and I've
begun work on handling RSS feeds. (The sync and RSS parsers are using
Python).

I'm writing a Gopher client for iOS. I'm hoping to have it ready by
mid to late summer.