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Comment by ted_dunning | Hacker News Reader

I took this book on a long (for me) trip to Minnesota the year that it came out.

It was a great read, trying to work out all the details with my eyes closed because back then computers didn't come on vacations with you. When I got back, I had a whole system to play with worked out in my head.

Forth was ultimately kind of a dead end, but it was a hugely educational one and it led me to bootstrapped versions of Lisp and many other wondrous things.

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I've always been a bit sad that more Forth-inspired DSLs never became a thing. Assembler Forths and C Forths often feel like DSLs on top of their host languages/environments, so doing the same thing as a network or build-system DSL would be interesting. I do recommend folks play around with more mature, big Forths like gForth to see what building an application up in a Forth like system actually feels like.

Commercial systems are also now available for free for trial or non-commerical use, that offer native code compilers and IDEs and Graphic interface tools.

VFX Forth from MPE UK

SwiftForth from USA

How about Forth as a compilation target for other languages. But you can dig in and define words for common patterns and the higher level code will be compiled down to that custom vocabulary instead.

Forth is just not very easily optimized - it has a lot of indirect jumps that do not play well with today's instruction pipelines.

There are a few optimizing forth compilers, but I never have seen compelling evidence that they would be faster than an optimized c compiler.

Forth also has seen comparatively little work lately - only a small number of people use it (for better or worse). Micropython might be eating Forth's lunch on many embedded systems that have a lot more memory/ resources now.

As a counterpoint, I found https://www.1-9-9-1.com/ which looks like a lot of fun.

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