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upofadowntoday at 1:03 PM0 repliesview on HN

Classic Forth Dimensions article: Why Forth Isn't Slow

* https://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V06N5.pdf

Basically it is because Forth programs are fairly flat and don't go deep into subfunctions. So the interpreter overhead is not that great and the processor spends most of the time running the machine code that underlays the primitives that live at the bottom of the program.