Xlerb
A Compiled "Forth" for the Beam
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HelloI've been working on a small stack language for the BEAM in my free time called 'Xlerb'.I read Starting Forth and thought it would be interesting to see if you could send messages to other stacks etc, and the BEAM seemed like a great fit.Xlerb is a small leex/yecc grammar and a simple-ish compiler that takes Forth-ish code and turns it into regular BEAM modules.The modules it produces just export functions from stack to stack, so there's a good interop story with Elixir/Erlang (if you'd ever want to do that?).I've the syntax a bit beyond a 'strict' forth with pattern matching, that makes it feel a bit more natural of a BEAM language (with different function heads etc). It was a fun exercise translating that into the Erlang primitives of case, send, receive etc.I've got a website at https://xlerb.wtf with a bit more, and you can get the code/compiler/repl at https://github.com/shawa/xlerbLet me know what you think!
HN · launched Nov 29, 2025 · 6 upvotes (top 73%) · 0 views
Niche: programming language compilers · 77 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
More like this: all 77 launches in programming language compilers →
Could you build this?
No Implementing a stack language compiler targetting the Erlang BEAM using leex (lexer) and yecc (parser) requires specialized compiler design knowledge and Erlang/OTP internals.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires an Erlang/Elixir stack with Leex for tokenization, Yecc for LALR-1 grammar parsing, and a compiler backend translating AST into BEAM bytecode or Core Erlang. It demands deep understanding of functional virtual machines, concurrency primitives (actor model message passing), and compiler construction techniques.
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Competitors
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Launched 24 days after the earliest competitor.
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