Konilo is a small, pragmatic personal computing system written in Forth and running on a tiny virtual computer.
A complete system consists of an ilo vm, an image file ("rom") with the Konilo system, and a set of blocks for storage of code and data.
ilo provides a portable MISC computer with 64k 32-bit cells of memory, dual stacks, 30 instructions, and a small set of I/O devices. Konilo runs on ilo and brings a complete text-centric computing system with a Forth-based interactive compiler, block storage, editors, tools, and documentation.
ilo is highly portable, with implementations written in many languages and binaries are provided for a variety of common host systems. All run the same Konilo system. Hosts have spanned eveything from 16-bit x86 and classic 68k Macintosh to modern 64-bit systems and WebAssembly. It's been used on hardware with as little as 384k of RAM.
Konilo, ilo, and the documentation for them are provided freely under an open source license.
Get Konilo
-
Konilo 2025.5
[
tar.gz,
zip ]
release notes - Nightly Snapshot [ tar.gz, zip ]
- konilo.sh [ konilo.sh, instructions ]
Documentation
System Files
ilo computer
-
ada,
apl,
awk,
c,
c#,
c++,
common lisp,
d,
fortran,
go,
hare,
haskell,
java,
js (node),
kotlin,
lua,
nim,
oberon,
pascal,
python,
retro,
rust,
scheme,
smalltalk,
swift,
tcl,
typescript,
WebAssembly,
zig
Additional implementations are included in the full source. - prebuilt ilo executables
Konilo
- ROM: ilo.rom
- Blocks: ilo.blocks
Repository
fossil clone http://fossils.retroforth.org:8000/ilo ilo.fsl
mkdir ilo
cd ilo
fossil open ../ilo.fslBare Metal & Embedded
Konilo can be run without an underlying OS. The currently supported bare metal and embedded systems are:
- x86: tested under emulation
- x86: Pocket386
- amd64: UEFI
- arm: Teensy 4.1 (ARMv7E-M)
- esp32: FabGL VGA32
- rp2350: Raspberry Pi Pico 2
Source for these is included in the repository and full releases.