I've always been really, really curious about the GA144 devkit for a while: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/, http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB014-190...

The only small caveat is that it's basically $500 for a PCB with two chips on it. (And a prototyping area, SRAM, an Ethernet PHY, SD, and USB...)

I'll probably continue to remain curious for some time, heh.

Which compiler, and for what purpose - did you end up buying? What does it give you beyond the many open implementations?

On a side note - anyone know if greenarrays is still delivering hw? Those multicore forth chips really seemed nice (and crazy).

Mostly performance. GForth is slow compared to the optimising compilers (I know about gforth-fast already). Also I don't care that much about open source. I'm old enough not to be opposed to the idea of buying compilers.

I ended up with iForth which is well priced, targets 64bit and has a simple license. Here's a feature list http://users.bart.nl/users/mhx/i4faq.html

SwiftForth and VFX are awesome as well but 32bit only and can't justify paying that much at this point.

Hm, I hadn't really thought about optimizing compilers for forth... I wonder if the strategies are different than for eg c or Pascal compilers.

I guess the situation is simalar for other closed compilers (Intel c, high perf Java compiler/VMs etc).