Gforth is a fast and portable implementation of the ANS Forth/Forth 200x language. It works nicely with the Emacs editor, offers some nice features such as input completion and history, backtraces, a decompiler and a powerful locals facility, and it has a comprehensive manual. Gforth combines traditional implementation techniques with newer techniques for portability and performance: its inner interpreter is direct threaded with several optimizations, but you can also use a traditional-style indirect threaded interpreter. Gforth is distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING).
Gforth is part of the GNU Operating System, developed by the GNU Project. To learn more about Free (libre) Software, you can read this page: https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
If you are the author of an awesome program and want to join us in writing Free (libre) Software, please consider making it an official GNU program and become a GNU Maintainer. You can find instructions on how to do this here: https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation
Another way to contribute to the Forth community is by uploading your program as a package to the Forth Net: https://theforth.net
Gforth runs under GNU, BSD, and similar systems, MS Windows and MacOS X and should not be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC. This version has been tested successfully on the following platforms:
- GNU/Linux
- amd64
- arm64
- armel
- armhf
- i386
- mips
- mipsel
- powerpc
- Android/Linux
- amd64
- arm64
- arm
- i386
- mips
- Gforth EC(embedded): r8c, 4stack, misc, 8086
- Windows
- amd64
- i386
- MacOS
- amd64
- i386
Read INSTALL for installation instructions from tarball,
or INSTALL.md for from git,
or INSTALL.BINDIST if you have a binary package distributed as .tar.xz file.
If you received a self-installing executable,
just run it and follow the instructions.
To start the system, just say gforth (after installing it).
You can find new versions of Gforth at
www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/
and current snapshots on
www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Snapshots/current/
or at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gforth/
On popular request, here are the meanings of unusual file extensions:
\*.fs Forth stream source file (include with "include _<file>_" from within
gforth, or start with "gforth _<file1> <file2>_ ...")
\*.fi Forth image files (start with "gforth -i _<image file>_")
\*.fb Forth blocks file (load with "use _<block file>_ 1 load")
\*.i C include files
\*.texi.in documenation source
\*TAGS etags files
A number of Forth source files are included in this package that are not necessary for building Gforth. Not all of them are mentioned in the rest of the documentation, so here's a short overview:
Add-ons:
code.fs random.fs more.fs ansi.fs colorize.fs
oof.fs oofsampl.fs objects.fs blocked.fb tasker.fs
Utilities:
ans-report.fs etags.fs glosgen.fs filedump.fs
Games:
tt.fs sokoban.fs
Test programs (for testing Forth systems):
test/*.fs
Benchmarks:
bubble.fs siev.fs matrix.fs fib.fs
ANS Forth implementations of Gforth extensions:
compat/*.fs
C-Bindings:
unix/*.fs
For discussions about Gforth, use the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.forth. If you prefer not to post on Usenet, there is also a mailing list: gforth@gnu.org. You have to subsribe to post there. You can subscribe through http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gforth. The list is archived at http://lists.gnu.org/pipermail/gforth/.
You can also report bugs through these channels, or you can report them through our bug database:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=addbug&group=gforth
Authors: Bernd Paysan, Anton Ertl, Gerald Wodni Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003,2004,2006,2007,2008,2009,2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021,2022,2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This file is part of Gforth.
Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.