[I'm sticking this here because there was a dude who said this was a good reply and I tried to reply to him and HN say s his post was deleted. I don't know why, his post seemed pretty reasonable to me, he was asking if forth was a good boot loader. Shrug.]

I don't for a minute think that forth is the best answer, it's an awful answer. Even lisp, which I hate with a passion, would be a better answer because more people have experience in lisp than forth.

Forth is just less shitty than what Intel came up with, I think it was part of EFI, it's amazingly bad. I've designed a few programming languages and I'm not good at it, but holy crap, I could be drunk and come up with a better answer than Intel did. Forth is just a crappy language but it's less crappy than what Intel did.

The idea that Forth is somehow special for boot loaders is nuts. There is nothing, that I know of, that makes forth somehow magical for that.

What you want for the bootloader, and for the debugger that you drop into when there is a panic, is something like C but interpreted. You want to be able to walk a linked list of page table structures. And to its credit, Sun's forth could do that. It's sort of twisted to think it could but it did, there were forth words that did all sorts of kernel magic.

I think that the magic of forth was that it was tiny, back 30 years ago you didn't want to have a lot of storage for your debugger. That's not the case today, if someone made the case that they could make things better, here you go, here's a gig of storage. That's a little crazy but still. Forth was cool when a meg of storage was a crazy amount.

We can do better. Intel pushed us backwards, Forth would be a step forwards, but man, I'd take python or Tcl (because then I'd get my pet language L, http://little-lang.org) or even perl as a better boot language.

Froth has no special boot sauce in my opinion. It was just small.