My 500 bytes Forth that wants to be fun to read and hack on.

[u/ekipan85]

https://github.com/ekipan/nictoforth

(Permalink as of this post, and diff with latest.)

I present Nictoforth: a space-and-pedagogy-constrained art Forth. It's carefully crafted to be read top-to-bottom:

• The repo README sets the stage. Boot sector, serial IO via BIOS.
• The assembly source is packed with narrative, rationale, and cross-reference. Search for:
  • "[0]" architecture if you want to dig in.
  • "[5]" interpreter, the heart of a Forth.
  • "[7]" the lovely straightforward compiler.
  • "[8]" the extremely wacky bootstrap. It's full of character but damn dense!
• If you clone the repo you can do make terse | bat -l nasm or | less to cut away all the asides and just read the code.
• An example demo session log. See it working.

u/s1nical posted their Milliforth fork the other day so I figured why not post mine too. It was lots of fun to write and educational besides!

[u/ekipan85]

Shortly after I shared to the Forth discord a few months ago u/mykesx quickly bought me a big pile of bytes that I spent on swap and the ok prompt. Somehow I've managed to scrouge for a few more lately and am considering experimenting with re-adding a numbers parser! Mostly the docs burden makes me not wanna. Still mulling it over.

$ git l --grep 'udget\|prompt'
* ef367f0  2026-05-15 12:19 ekipan  
| introduce com1 shared tail. budget 12->13
* b725d40  2026-05-15 12:09 ekipan  
  shave two bytes. budget 10->12
* c7bad69  2026-05-13 11:29 ekipan  
  shave two bytes. budget 8->10
* fc8fc9d  2026-01-30 02:29 ekipan  
  add ok prompt (edit: I forgot to write Budget: 8 here)
* bf90f48  2025-11-24 13:15 ekipan  
  Optimize rpush/rpop. Budget: 18.
* 79db61b  2025-11-23 21:58 ekipan  
  Add underflow check. Budget: 14.
* 85e2a0e  2025-11-16 12:49 ekipan  
  Bought swap. Budget: 16.
* a837d57  2025-11-14 13:55 ekipan  
  c.list dw -> db. Budget: 25. Thanks, @mschwartz!
* 670ac5b  2025-11-12 17:27 ekipan  
  Hello, world. Budget: 1.