"He developed the well respected Reva Forth, used by hobbyists around the world. "

Reva Forth always seemed nice but I could never get it working on anything other than Windows.

As such, I have little faith that "8th" will place any value on portability either, e.g., that it will be ported to BSD, Plan 9 or other RPi-compatible OS.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of more portable, open source Forths to choose from.

Example:

    ftp -4o cforthu.zip https://codeload.github.com/pahihu/cforthu/zip/master

Some HN commenters are questioning the peculiar security claims.

The author discloses that 8th depends on a number of third party libraries. Would this mean that each of those third parties would also have to make similar security claims to 8th?

For example, 8th uses an HTML5 parsing library from Google called gumbo-parser.

"Non-goals:

Security. Gumbo was initially designed for a product that worked with trusted input files only. We're working to harden this and make sure that it behaves as expected even on malicious input, but for now, Gumbo should only be run on trusted input or within a sandbox. Gumbo underwent a number of security fixes and passed Google's security review as of version 0.9.1."

source: https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser

It may be the case the only input parsed by 8th is trusted or "within a sandbox" but without the source code how would this be verified?