Eight primitives and a colon compiler in 512 bytes is a nice demonstration of how much you can bootstrap from almost nothing. The examples building up from there are the best part.
Really shows how approachable it would have been to have just a tiny bit more added to the API of 'PC BIOS' to make for an extremely portable driver platform system to allow OS independent arbitrary hardware drivers as Forth that the system BIOS could compile at boot and run beneath the OS. Though of course the PC BIOS API from when that mattered isn't in anything like a modern protect mode operating profile.
Eight primitives and a colon compiler in 512 bytes is a nice demonstration of how much you can bootstrap from almost nothing. The examples building up from there are the best part.
Really shows how approachable it would have been to have just a tiny bit more added to the API of 'PC BIOS' to make for an extremely portable driver platform system to allow OS independent arbitrary hardware drivers as Forth that the system BIOS could compile at boot and run beneath the OS. Though of course the PC BIOS API from when that mattered isn't in anything like a modern protect mode operating profile.
2020
Not that impressive considering this uses BIOS routines heavily and whole operating systems including basic interpreter fit in a couple of KiB
512 bytes is quite a bit less than "a couple of kilobytes"
It's much better than 512, it fits in 336 bytes iirc.