Thank you for the pointer to retro[1] and related[2] projects!
I also sort of found Factor interesting -- but much of the point with Forth, is a high-ish level of abstraction on bare metal hardware. If you're going to be using a vm etc... why not program in something that is much more abstract, like Smalltalk, Lisp, Python -- whatever really? Retro I can get, apparently it is small and very portable -- that makes sense (perhaps not more sense than Smalltalk, though).
I also sort of found Factor interesting -- but much of the point with Forth, is a high-ish level of abstraction on bare metal hardware. If you're going to be using a vm etc... why not program in something that is much more abstract, like Smalltalk, Lisp, Python -- whatever really? Retro I can get, apparently it is small and very portable -- that makes sense (perhaps not more sense than Smalltalk, though).
[1] http://www.forthworks.com/retro/
[2] http://www.forthworks.com/parable/
http://retroforth.org/docs/The_Ngaro_Virtual_Machine.html