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                      The unbearable lightness of Forth

I mentioned Forth [1] in conjunction with bootstrapping a language [2] and I
think it would be constructive to show just how small Forth can be. I'm
referencing JONESFORTH [3], an implemention of Forth bootstrapped from
assembly language. It took only 2,313 lines of assembly for JONESFORTH (and
easily half of that is comments describing the inner workings of the Forth
environment) versus the 3,663 lines of assembly for the first stage of amber
[4] (the other language mentioned the other day).

Now, granted, the first stage of amber is usable as is, whereas JONESFORTH
takes another 1,788 lines of code in Forth (and again, about half is just
comments describing the implementation) to get a near fully fledged Forth
system (JONESFORTH does not support DOES> and why that is important will take
another post).

So yes, Forth is pretty easy to bootstrap. (and small—the JONESFORTH
executable is only 17K (kilobytes)—when was the last time you saw a compiler
that small?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/06/11.2
[3] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-repository/
[4] https://github.com/nineties/amber

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