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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Running bigFORTH on amd64
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2025 14:56:55 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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David Meyer <papa@sdf.org> writes:
>What are the major differences between bigFORTH and gforth?

From a practical view: AFAIK bigForth is no longer maintained, while
Gforth is (and Bernd Paysan, the author of bigForth, has put a lot of
work into Gforth in the last decade).  Also, bigForth only has IA-32
(32-bit Intel/AMD) and 68k support, while Gforth runs on a wide range
of architectures, including AMD64 (64-bit Intel/AMD) and ARM A64.

Genealogically Gforth was started by using a lot of the Forth part of
BigForth and porting it to the Gforth engine.  So at some point in the
1990s there was a lot of commonality, and there has been some
cross-fertilization over the years, but eventually Bernd put the focus
on Gforth.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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