static dictionary never loads -- infinite loop about pforth

[philburk]

The x86 is Little-Endian and I think the Microblaze is Big-Endian.
That might be the issue.
Did you define PF_BIG_ENDIAN_DIC
http://www.softsynth.com/pforth/pf_ref.php#Compiling-pForth

[jbdatko]

Thanks Phil, I'll take a look. Microblaze is configurable endianness, I'm pretty sure it was set to LE, but I'll check.

Would a 64 bit generated dictionary affect running on a 32 bit system?

I also tried this on an ARM 32 platform where I thought I would have more success. I generated the dictionary from the host, copied the static dictionary, but same issue.

What does work is to start forth on the embedded system with no dictionary. This requires some hacking of things to make pforth want to initialize the dictionary w/o FILEIO, but it does work. But to date, I've been unsuccessful in bringing over a static dictionary. In the end, this may be fine as the default dictionary is a bit "feature-full" for a no-OS embedded system, but I was just surprised by this behavior.

[philburk]

Would a 64 bit generated dictionary affect running on a 32 bit system?

Yes, they are incompatible. The C code should check for that but may not.

This requires some hacking of things to make pforth want to initialize the dictionary w/o FILEIO, but it does work.

How do you "initialize the dictionary" without compiling from files, loading a dictionary file, or building with a static dictionary?

[philburk]

I tried loading a 64-bit dictionary with a 32-bit pforth executable and got:

Error in pfLoadDictionary - cell size mismatch between .dic file and code

I also tried a 32-bit dic and 64-bit code and got the same error.

I am closing this because I think the problem was using a 64-bit dictionary on a 32-bit system.

You can compile a 32-bit pforth using

cd platforms/unix
make WIDTHOPT=-m32

If you have a missing bits file you may need gcc-multilib.
See https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/compile-32-bit-program-64-bit-gcc-c-c/

[jbdatko]

Thanks for trying! I for sure tried 64->32, so this is probably it. I have a 32-bit arm with linux on it and I can build the dic there and try it.

Thanks again for the help.