That’s definitely an interesting idea. Thanks for sharing.

Though it means that someone down the line must have written a bootstrap programme with C/Assembler to run the host forth.

In case of jbForth, I decided to write the bootstrap too.

That’s impossible unless you’ve got a Forth machine.

Where the OS native API is accessible via C API, you’re bound to write, using C/C++/Rust/etc, a small bootstrap programme to then write your Forth on top of. That’s essentially what bjForth is at the moment: the bootstrap using JVM native API.

Currently I’m working on a set of libraries to augment the 80-something words bjForth bootstrap provides. These libraries will be, as you suggested, written in Forth not Java because they can tap into the power of JVM via the abstraction API that bootstrap primitives provide.

Hope this makes sense.

Haha…good point! That said bjForth is still a fully indirect threaded Forth. It’s just that instead of assembler and C/C++ it calls Java API to do its job.