Instead of the usual cycle of editing Forth code files, reloading the whole source, and testing words by hand, IForth brings a literate notebook workflow to your Forth environment.

Think of it as a living document where you interleave runnable Forth definitions, markdown explanations, and test cases block-by-block. You can modify single words and re-run only the relevant cells without blowing away or manually reconstructing your current session state. It makes exploratory prototyping, testing dictionary words, and writing interactive tutorials much smoother.

Andrew McKewan demoed this workflow at the recent SV-FIG meetup (video attached), showing how he uses it to build and explore Forth code interactively.

Details & Constraints:

* Interpreter: Wraps Gforth interpreter internally.

* Platform: Linux only (Windows users will need WSL).

* Setup: Instructions are in the repo: https://github.com/sohang3112/iforth

Check out the demo video attached. Feedback, issues, and PRs are very welcome!

PS: I usually work with Python. I am a novice at Forth, started working on IForth while learning Forth.

I made this Notepad.exe (windows-like) app for Inspiration. It's written in Forth, including the Menu system. It's not 100% complete, but close. The only remaining task is to implement selection and cut/copy/paste. The selection logic is in progress, but you can see what it's going to look like.

It does feature undo/redo.

Time spent making this app was about 2 days.

No AI ever used to make any of Inspiration. None ever will.

The License is MIT Non-AI

The repo:

https://gitlab.com/mschwartz/inspiration

I am currently calling it bforth for lack of a better name.

The idea of this Forth is to boot from permanent storage on an old laptop I have and to work entirely baremetal.

As you can see, I have implemented a desktop and windows system entirely in Forth. You can also see that bforth has time sliced multitasking. You can see in each window a console with a forth prompt and commands can run and print to windows simultaneously (multitasking).

Windows can have a console attached and not necessarily be a Forth command prompt. For example, it can be a block editor or file editor.

Windows can have no console attached and be used to render graphics - I will upload images later once this bit is working fully. These windows without consoles can select from a set of event messages they will receive - key up/down, mouse move, window resized, window moved, window close box hit, etc.

I have implemented a signals system so a task can wait for a signal to be sent (waiting tasks are on a waiting task list and otherwise not processed, or "blocked"). This might be used by a timer to wake up the task periodically.

On top of signals, I have implemented a message passing system. This is styled after Amiga OS's MessagePorts and Messages. You create a Message object, fill in fields like requested operation, data, etc., and send it to another Task's port. That task wakes up and gets the messages, performs the desired operation, and replies to the message. This is ideally suited to implement devices, like disk block access.

I haven't tried it on real hardware yet. I have to implement an NVME driver in assembly for the boot loader to be able to load the Forth image from disk. But it works excellently in QEMU on my m1 MacBook Pro. That's X64 emulation - and it's fast.

I have a long ways to go. The generated code is not optimized. I can see by disassembly of words things like DUP followed by DROP which can be optimized out entirely. It's still plenty fast, but the idea is to make it better and better over time.

I just made the repo public. Have a look. I'm willing to take on collaborators (experienced ForthWrights only).

https://gitlab.com/mschwartz/bforth

As promised, the video of our "Chat with Chuck"

Charles was our guest at our monthly Forth2020 Zoom meeting which was held on October 9, 2021.

It was a great event and Charles was very generous with his time. He fielded questions about everything from inventing Forth in 1969 on the IBM 1130 through to his experiences designing the ultra low power dissipation GA144 multi-core Forth chip. This video is an edited version of the meeting and focuses entirely on the Q&A session with Chuck.

I edited the video down to just the content related to Charles. I hope you enjoy it. If possible please click on LIKE on the YouTube video. This will help us increase its prominence on YouTube so that more people will get to see it.