I believe BigForth was absorbed into what is now GForth (still maintained). See the GForth “pedigree”: <a href="https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/Origin.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/Ori...</a>
Forth is super cool for embedded work. The normal dev cycle of build, burn, not work, tweak, build, burn, repeat is quite slow and annoying. It was kind of revolutionary for me to discover Mecrisp[0], which demonstrates how can provide a (fast!) language that also provides a friggin' repl into your hardware.<p>The ##forth IRC channel on Libera is quite active. Would recommend popping in for anyone interested. The two projects that got me interested in Forth are<p>1. JonesForth: <a href="http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob;f=jonesforth.S;hb=HEAD" rel="nofollow">http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob;f=jonesforth...</a><p>Explanation and motivation for the What and Why of Forth and its implementation. Well, actually, it's actually an implementation in x86 assembly, but the comments are a wonderful exposition and intro into Forth.<p>2. SmithForth: <a href="https://dacvs.neocities.org/SF/" rel="nofollow">https://dacvs.neocities.org/SF/</a><p>Implementation of Forth in x86-64 <i>opcodes</i>. It's a hand-written ELF that implements a Forth. It's simplicity is absolutely beautiful.<p>SmithForth is what pushed me over the edge to really start learning x86 assembly and Forth. I started by hand-decompiling the SmithForth binary, which was quite an adventure on its own.<p>[0]:<a href="https://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">https://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/</a>
Having used Forth professionally for about ten years, the language has always held a special place in my heart. I have had the experience (fun!) of implementing Forth from nothing in a couple of processors (6502 and 68K).<p>While I do think the language is useful in certain domains, the main problem everyone has with it will be finding qualified programmers. I’ve had to convert codebases to C for this reason and, back in the day, made a fair bit of money doing this as a gun for hire.
where does bigFORTH lay on Big Scale?<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/2130/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2130/</a>