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A few comments follow; note that I'm not unbiased :) RetroForth is smaller and easier to build than gforth or Factor. I actively use it and seek to improve it, and I've been told the documentation is good, though I still feel I have a long way to go on that front. It's not a traditional Forth, but it works well for me. I borrow things from traditional Forth, colorForth, Factor, 8th, and other languages when I think they make sense for my needs. Releases are quarterly, with daily snapshots provided. Gforth is big and I find it to be difficult to build from source. If you need or want a traditional/standard Forth, it's probably what I'd recommend if using one of the commercial ones isn't an option. Definitely build it from source though; the releases are infrequent and the development versions have a lot of bug fixes and improvements. Factor is big, has lots of interesting stuff, but apart from stacks and colon decisions, really doesn't feel like Forth to me. It is under active development, but releases other than snapshots are very infrequent (last in 2018). Building from source isn't something I've done with this in years, and platform support is more limited (Linux, Windows, macOS, on x86 or x86-64). I've borrowed some ideas and terminology from Factor over the years and would consider it worth learning from. |