[ehaliewicz2]

> local variables

I believe most modern forths will have these, gnuforth does for example.

> down-to-the-metal compiling

I think there are some that do this, but back in the day, the opinion of lots of forth programmers was that threaded code was good for the 90% of the program where performance didn't matter, and added an inline assembler for areas where it did.

[Someone]

And of course, you can always add support for local variables yourself. For an example, see http://turboforth.net/resources/locals.html, which takes 808 bytes to implement. That’s hefty, for some systems where one would use Forth, but, FTA, “Placing key values in locals will actually both increase peformance, and make your code smaller”, so you can earn that back if you use the facility enough)