I have made a living with Forth since 1981. I have written very few new Forth kernels, but have ported them to many CPU architectures. Forth is no longer fashionable, but it works.

Writing a new Forth may be an interesting project, but you will not write a good one until you have a few applications under your belt. Forth is a very subtle language. The internet is full of abandoned Forth kernel projects. Many of these may well have succeeded if they had a purpose that was not yet satisfied.

It is perfectly possible to write large applications in Forth. One of our clients has an application of 1.4 million lines of Forth source code. It is hosted on VFX Forth, which compiles Forth to native code. The VFX version runs at least ten times faster than the previous threaded code version, built on MPE's ProForth compiler.