back to ForthSystems

Stand-alone Forths are designed to be used as an operating system. They are generally smaller, and faster than general-purpose operating systems, though some are built around traditional kernels like Linux. Read more about Forth-OS

    • Written in C / C+ASM
    • Written in Forth (MetaCompiler/CrossMetaCompiler, using Forth to translate to code)
      • avrforth for AVR devices, colorForth influenced.
      • 8051+
        • [8052-ANS-Forth] version 1.12a standalone on our ATS-board with 80C535, also available for 8032, 80C320 and 80C552.
      • x86
        • ForthOS (eForth derivate – adapted to load from GRUB)
        • MetaStic (metacompiler) worked as stand-alone on H8 CPUs, but alas only the MS-DOS version is available, which uses DOS/BIOS functions for file- and terminal i/o, and has some bits of 8086 code in its setup. It reverses the Forth/metacompiler approach: the result of metacompilation can compile its own sources without additional loading, which can be extended to become a full Forth.
  • Commercial
    • 4os (No longer available)
    • CamelForth 8051, 8086, Z80, 6809, Rabbit2000
    • JPB Forth (Assembly)
  • CrossForth - a CrossForth is not a stand-alone system, but can be used to compile stand alone code for the given platform, and may be an alternative or complement to the systems listed here.

FreeBSD also uses a standalone Forth (based on Ficl) to load itself.


"UmbilicalForths" and "Forth cross compilers" (see CrossForth) may require a PC with its operating system to be plugged into the target system while interactively programming. But then the target is unplugged and it runs the Forth program on the target system without any underlying operating system.