People still use Forth for embedded work (there are two major Forth vendors with a definite customer base). I'd say it's quite rare in the server realm, but I know of one company doing storage stuff that has a Forth written on top of C running on FreeBSD and their engineers really like it as they understand the full system outside of the C compiler. Who understands even 25% of C++?

...Storage?

Nice.

The Philae spacecraft [1] (2014, first craft to "land" on a comet) was controlled by a couple of Harris RTX2010 CPUs, which are radiation-hardened CPUs that execute Forth words natively.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)

[2] https://www.intersil.com/content/dam/Intersil/documents/hs-r...

FreeBSD uses Forth as a scripting language of its boot chain. illumos had recently started using the same boot chain.

They are replacing it with a Lua-scripted bootloader: https://readlist.com/lists/freebsd.org/freebsd-current/25/12...

Apparently one of the "features" motivating the decision to use Lua is "it's interpreter is very small (~240 KB)," which sounds like a dumb joke when you consider Forth's footprint.

I remember PowerPC Macs using Open Firmware, which had a Forth REPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

if I understand correctly, you're the author of decompiler for StarFlight game. The most famous game written in Forth. And maybe most popular piece of Forth software of all times. So I think you surely know more about Forth than many modern Forthers do :)

Sorry, if I reveal this link too early, but this is very impressive work of you and StarFlight game/engine really deserves more popularity!

https://github.com/s-macke/starflight-reverse

Yes, that's me. I decompiled it. And it is the most fun reverse engineering project you can imagine. Expect the unexpected. There is a Forth interpreter hidden in the code and some of word names are still in the code. So you can produce almost readable code.

When I started I had not even a clue what Forth is about. I read the first articles about Forth long after I started the decompilation project.

I still have to write a long text in the README, why the code of Starflight is almost as awesome as the game itself. Then it is ready for publish :-)

I would say, that I know about this special dialect more than most of the other Forthers. I have not written more than a few lines of Forth myself. But I have read a lot of Forth code.