Xlerb
A Compiled "Forth" for the Beam
Details
- External ID
- 46091455
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Nov. 29, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.27074235807860264
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- spreadsheet and tabular data tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- forth compiler for the beam vm
- Manually corrected
- False
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.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
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Launched 21 days after the earliest competitor.
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