[golem14]

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?

[seba_dos1]

You interface with SoC's peripherals rather than bit-bang lines. You can think of them as a kind of memory mapped APIs.

[golem14]

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.