Forth is just not very easily optimized - it has a lot of indirect jumps that do not play well with today's instruction pipelines. There are a few optimizing f

Forth is just not very easily optimized - it has a lot of indirect jumps that do not play well with today's instruction pipelines. There are a few optimizing forth compilers, but I never have seen compelling evidence that they would be faster than an optimized c compiler. Forth also has seen comparatively little work lately - only a small number of people use it (for better or worse). Micropython might be eating Forth's lunch on many embedded systems that have a lot more memory/ resources now. As a counterpoint, I found https://www.1-9-9-1.com/ https://www.1-9-9-1.com/ which looks like a lot of fun.