I did actually make an attempt at that once for BGGP5 [0]. (That is, making a minimal, horribly insecure 'client' implementing just enough behavior to get a response from a server.) But I got demoralized by how much space the binary blobs for the crypto algorithms took up, in comparison to the actual machine code.
I'd really like to see a TCP/IP stack written in native forth (if anyone needs a really good therapist, that sounds like a _great_ project to try ;)
I mean, it doesn't look _that_ daunting, but the fact that noone seems to ever have release an open source version (there are rumours of proprietary stacks though) speaks for itself.
Yes, well aware of it, that's actually very nice for building higher levels of the webserver.
I'd really like to have a complete forth machine dealing with everything, say on an esp32. I guess there's FreeRTOS, so I could use that network layer, but bare metal would be so much cooler. I admit I don't even understand how it would work - would I have to bit-bang the ethernet lines?
I never interface with the peripheral in an ESP32 directly. I guess I really need to read the Free-RTOS code. Micropython just uses that, last I checked.
[0] https://binary.golf/5/