Forth – is it still relevant?

Re:Forth – is it still relevant? by Mmrnmhrm on Sunday November 09, 2025 @01:15PM (#45867690)

The power of FORTH is that creating a variation tailored to your specific problem is almost effortless.

In most languages, building a compiler or interpreter is a major project. With FORTH, if you’re the only user, you can have something working in minutes.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve thrown together a simple stack-based interpreter. Whenever I need to encode non-trivial behavior in an app, I know I can spin up a quick FORTH and get it done.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Forth – is it still relevant? by tdeck on Sunday November 09, 2025 @11:03PM (#45872301)

Let's imagine for the sake of argument that I don't need to write a compiler or interpreter. What else is FORTH well suited for?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Forth – is it still relevant? by cmrdporcupine on Sunday November 09, 2025 @11:57PM (#45872577)

It's often used in bootloader/firmware type stuff (or was) because it can be a bit higher level than assembly and not subject to the same types of vulnerabilities and crashes... but written in a few KB and even easily hand written in assembly. And often run pretty fast, depending on the architecture.

[ Parent | on HN ]