SwiftForth Beta Test Page

These are the release notes for the beta test channel for SwiftForth-ARM64 for Windows, Linux, and macOS. See the Installation Notes for the beta versions at the end of this post.

SwiftForth 4.2.0-RC5 21-Aug-2026

  • Fixed decode of some variants of LDR in the disassembler
  • Fixed stack allocation in ((ACTIVATE)) for Windows ARM64 task startup
  • Renamed CACHE-FLUSH to CODE-FLUSH to better reflect its purpose
  • Added variable optimization rules to the code optimizer
  • Fixed a bug in the defining part of SYNONYM (thanks, Bruno!)

SwiftForth 4.2.0-RC4 20-Aug-2026

  • Fixed bug in EMPTY (thanks, Allen!)
  • Reworked macOS code space image to allow it to run on M2 and higher Apple Silicon
  • Added com.apple.security.cs.allow-jit entitlement to support mmap() with MAP_JIT in SwiftForth loader
  • Improved ARM64 cache flushing on all platforms

SwiftForth 4.2.0-RC3 16-Aug-2026

  • Added com.apple.security.get-task-allow to the entitlements for the macOS binaries to allow attaching LLDB for debugging.
  • Improved the optimization in ; that removes prolog/epilog from : definitions with no relative position dependencies.

SwiftForth 4.2.0-RC2 15-Aug-2026

  • The macOS installer package builder had a missing “arm64” architecture specification, which could result in linking to the x64 executables if the package installer runs under Rosetta. Thanks to David McClain for helping track this down.
  • Added the missing LC_UUID command in its Mach-o headers to the SwiftForth macOS loader.
  • Fixed the macOS architecture test syntax in the postinstall script.

SwiftForth 4.2.0-RC1 15-Aug-2026

  • Initial Beta release

Installation Notes

Windows

SwiftForth for Windows is supplied as a Windows installer. It will use a different default installation path from your existing SwiftForth install to keep it separate for testing.

SwiftForth-ARM64 requires Windows 11 for ARM64.

macOS

SwiftForth for macOS is supplied as an Apple installer package. After you download it, run the .pkg installer. It will install in your Applications folder as /Applications/ForthInc-Beta/SwiftForth. It will also add symlinks in /usr/local/bin so you can run sf and sfk from any Terminal session.

SwiftForth-ARM64 requires macOS for Apple Silicon.

Linux

SwiftForth for Linux is supplied as a tarball. After you download it, cd to the location in which you want it expanded (should be a different directory from your current SwiftForth) and unpack the tarball:

cd <new SwifForth parent directory>
tar -xzf <path to downloaded tarball>

Then cd to the new SwiftForth directory and run the install.sh script. It will install sf and sfk symlinks from /usr/local/bin back to the SwiftForth/bin/linux. It will also remove any ~/bin/sf* symlinks (so restore those later if needed).

cd SwiftForth
./install.sh

When you run sf from the command line, you should see this:

~$ sf
SwiftForth ARM64-<os> 4.2.0-RCnn <date>

Bug Reports

Please report any and all issues to [email protected]. Include as many details as possible. Screenshots are great!