Which Forth to start porting from?

Question

I'm looking to develop a new Forth system, aimed at making game development easier on one or possibly several retro console platforms. I'm something of a Forth beginner, and need your help deciding which Forth codebase to start porting from.

I'm basically looking for the merits / disadvantages of particular Forths vs each other. I've read the source to JonesFORTH as well as both praise and criticism of it, and discussions on ANS forth, and have unfortunately been left feeling rather confused. The Forth community, from what I can tell, seems to be fairly brutally divided along the standards-compliance issue, with very good arguments made by both camps as to why the standard is both a good, and a terrible, thing. However I cannot seem to find good practical advice on what exactly the standard changes, other than a general sense that it makes things more complicated and bloaty than they perhaps need to be.

I'm hoping to make development easier for programmers and hobbyists currently scared off by the prospect of developing in assembly or C, so I'm leaning towards a more simple Forth, but I really don't know enough about Forth yet to make an educated decision.

Answer 1

I'm kind of where you are right now. I've been casually reading up on Forth for a while and also think it has a lot of potential--maybe for scripting too. However, I am nowhere near an authority, but here are my thoughts.

First of all, Forth seems to be the ultimate programmable programming language--even more than lisp. To that end, I'm not sure how much C or assembly you'll need to code. I was leaning more towards developing vocabularies in Forth itself. After all, that's how it's supposed to be used.

Second, of the implementations I've tried, I like Gforth and Pforth the best.

Which ones are you using?

Finally, here is a list of online forth reading I've discovered:

Starting Forth

Thinking Forth

Forth Primer

Forth Language

Forth Tutorials

Pforth Tutorial

Gforth Manual

Begin Forth

WikiForth

OLPC Forth

Lets Build a Compiler

Have you found any others?