As with all languages, the compiled/interpreted distinction is a thing of convention/existing tools. Interpreted Forth is small, and tolerable speed-wise for t

As with all languages, the compiled/interpreted distinction is a thing of convention/existing tools. Interpreted Forth is small, and tolerable speed-wise for tiny systems. But Forth can also be compiled directly to native machine code. Relatively easily, you can get rid of the interpreter overhead by writing blocks of machine code that do each Forth word's action, instead of bytecode to dispatch the interpreter to each of those routines. Forth can be adapted for that easily enough, and some Forths do support this on a per-word basis, allowing you to pick how you want your words compiled. Forth can also get the whole optimizing compiler treatment. Some optimizing Forth compilers have been released, but I don't know how good they were/are. Certainly never needed that kind of speed myself. I don't know if any Forth yet benefited from it, but a lot of work was put into Java, on approaches for optimizing stack machine-style code to reasonably fast native code for register machines.