Forth – is it still relevant?

The article doesn’t mention performance. Because Forth programs basically chain subroutine calls together, it’s a safe bet it is bad on modern hardware with its multitude of caches.

That’s something you could prevent with an advanced compiler that inlines lots of code and carefully tries to put functions often called together in cache lines, but this code doesn’t do that, and if you did, why spend that effort on your compiler if a simple traditional language makes that inlining easier?

I still feel like I need to learn Forth.

It has always fascinates me how Forth has been historically used for low level embedded programming, but also can be as high level as you’d like. I feel like this isn’t a concept that has really gone away.

> With all the advantages, it is unfortunate that Forth lost out to C language over the years and have been reduced to a niche. Per ChatGPT: due to C's broader appeal, standardization, and support ecosystem likely contributed to its greater adoption and use in mainstream computing.

Oh, please. I've written in Forth. It's useful when you have to do a cram job to fit in a really tiny machine. Otherwise, no.

yosefk had the ultimate take on this: https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...

I don't know about now but it soon may be :)

An interesting project chose it as its lang: https://collapseos.org/