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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

Are there any non-toy implementations of Forth?

gforth (https://www.gnu.org/software/gforth/) is non-toy, although at the same time I'm not aware of commercial products that might use it.

Gforth and pForth [0] are the usual Free and Open Source go-to Forths. Gforth is quite good at pointing out silly mistakes in your code. Unfortunately Gforth doesn't have great Windows support, and neither of them have very strong FFI.

There are a number of proprietary payware Forths for desktop/server: vfxForth, [1] SwiftForth, [2] and iForth. [3]

There are also various Forths for all sorts of embedded platforms, many of them FOSS.

[0] https://github.com/philburk/pforth

[1] https://vfxforth.com/

[2] https://www.forth.com/swiftforth/

[3] https://iforth.nl/

OpenFirmware/OpenBoot, i.e. the "BIOS" on a lot of SPARC and PowerPC machines, is one such implementation.

It irks me to this day that various hardware ecosystems ended up going for things like UEFI and uBoot when OF already existed.

Try https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/docs/makoBas...

and

https://github.com/ablevm/able-forth/tree/current

In addition to the others mentioned here. It's a shame the able gui was not open sourced.

There are probably several, but I had contact in the beginning of my career with a company that made industrial printers. They said that, in the first years of the company (80s), adopting FORTH gave them an edge over the competitors and it was the main (tech) factor of their success. They implemented their firmware in FORTH with some PostScript wizardry as well.

also Factor (https://factorcode.org/)

As long as we're talking about concatenative languages, here's Joy:

https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of trolling, nonetheless: mecrisp is great and definitively no toy.

In fairness, there's an over abundance of toy Forths. And I say that as a fan and professional Forth programmer.

I don't know what qualifies has "non-toy", but Forth has been used in various toys [1]

[1] https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-apps/

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