To add a bit to this, although Dusk OS doesn't have the same goals as stage0, that is to mitigate the "trusting trust" attack, I think it effectively does it. Dusk OS kernels are less than 3000 bytes. The rest boots from source. One can easily audit those 3000 bytes manually to ensure that there's nothing inserted.

That being said, the goal of stage0 is to ultimately compile gcc and there's no way to do that with Dusk OS.

That being said (again), this README in stage0 could be updated because I indeed think that Dusk is a good counterpoint to this critique of Forth.

Oh, amazing! I've heard of DuskOS before but I didn't realize its C compiler was written in Forth.

Looks like it makes quite a few changes to C so it can't really run unmodified C code. I wonder how much work it would take to convert a full C compiler into something DuskCC can compile.

One of my goals with Onramp is to compile as much unmodified POSIX-style C code as possible without having to implement a full POSIX system. For example Onramp will never support a real fork() because the VM doesn't have virtual memory, but I do want to implement vfork() and exec().