The "new synthesis" of Forth is an ongoing effort in spirit of the Forth Modification Laboratory workshops. Its aim is to identify the essentials of Forth and to combine them in a new way to build systems that can scale-down as Forth always did and can scale-up to large applications and development projects.

The new synthesis is guided by the two principles biological analogy and disaggregation.

We scrutinize many aspects of traditional and modern Forth implementations trying to separate techniques that are normally deeply intertwined. After isolating the techniques we thrive to combine them in new ways.

The talk describes two mile stones of the ongoing project:

preForth (< 500 LOCs) a minimalistic non-interactive Forth kernel that can bootstrap itself and can be used as an easy-to-port basis for a full Forth implementation or implementing other programming languages. It is an open ended language that inherits functionality from the target platform's development tools.

seedForth (<550 LOCs) a minimal stack based extensible programming system accepting tokenized source code. seedForth can be extended in various ways: as stand alone applications, as fully interactive systems, as umbilical target system for embedded system's programming

We try to use Forth wherever possible in order to minimize semantic and formalism mismatches. Everything should be readily available - no hidden secrets.

Of course many of the subjects we are looking at have been used by others in the Forth community and outside - we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants - however we believe our new synthesis to be original.