We’ll be honest. Measuring Forth words per second doesn’t seem like a great benchmark since a Forth word could be very simple or quite complex. But we think the real meaning is “up to 400 million words per second.” There was a time when that level of performance would take a huge computer. These days, a simple board that costs a few bucks can do the trick, according to [Peter Forth] in an online presentation.

The key is the use of the Milk V Duo and some similar boards. Some of these look similar to a Raspberry Pi Pico. However, this chip on board has two RISC V cores, an ARM core, and an 8051. There’s also an accelerator coprocessor for vector operations like AI or video applications.

[Peter] has some popular Forth systems ported to the machine on GitHub. This might be the easiest way to get started because, as he mentions in the video, the documentation for these boards leaves something to be desired. However, these chips have a lot of capability for a small price.

We like Forth. If you want something that is less of a port, we’ve seen some native RISC V implementations.