wat-js VS Kind

Well Forth is possibly the most minimal VM over a platform, as evidenced by openfirmware.

It does have problems scaling though, in that if you've seen one Forth, you've seen one Forth ie. The variations required to fit a platform make them semi-incompatible.

That's not to say that a more lispy Forth wouldn't be useful though, in that a concatenative syntax allows us to pass custom datastructures around like APL, and CPS (delimited continuations with lexically scoped dynamic binding would come from the lisp side (see https://github.com/manuel/wat-js).

Memory management in Forth can handle multiple memory types eg. https://flashforth.com/ so adding something like ref counting (https://github.com/zigalenarcic/minilisp/blob/main/main.c) to handle the dynamic list side of things might mesh well.

In any case, if you're looking for a self hosting lisp that runs on bare metal, https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru has been out for a few years.

https://github.com/manuel/wat-js

If you have delimited continuations then you can construct coroutines/threads/await/async, promises etc.

I guess that this might be suitable for many scenarios thanks to nodejs, but the runtimes it relies on are not exactly small.

Depending on what you mean by practical it already is! https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/Kind HVM was developed to be an efficient backend for the Kind language from the same folks

One thing that you can use right now is Kind, a functional language and proof assistant.

Hey, that's pretty cool! The lang that targets this runtime is https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/Kind