alt Hacker NewsNice to see gforth is still being maintained.
BTW, on the other side, looks like gforth still lacks the ability to create native OS executable, something like:
gcc myprog.c -o myprog
?
Replies
nickcw • today at 3:26 PM
You may enjoy ccforth then which is a mostly gforth compatible compiler which compiles to native via C.
https://github.com/ncw/ccforth
I wrote it as an experiment in having both a forth interpreter and compiler running at the same time.
That’s because Gforth is a threaded-code VM that saves dictionary images rather than compiling to native code.
As you prolly know, Forth blurs compile time and run time in general, and there’s no so-called clean compile, then link boundary like in C.
SwiftForth, VFX Forth, and iForth do emit real executables, and there are smaller native-code Forths for Linux too, but then the opportunity cost is losing Gforth’s portability and its standards-heavy library ecosystem.