Factor is now three years old
Friday, September 1, 2006
That’s right, and if you read the blog post from a year ago, you’ll see Factor has made a lot of progress.
Just for kicks I downloaded Factor 0.77. It took 34 minutes to bootstrap on my x86 machine. Current Factor releases bootstrap in 2 minutes 30 seconds on that machine. Not only has the performance of the compiler improved drastically, but the amount of optimizations it does – and not to mention the volume of code being compiled – has increased too.
A quick overview of just some of the major improvements in the last year:
- The UI has improved a lot: OpenGL rendering, multi-window support, browser, graphical single stepper, etc
- Hypertext online help, full text search
- AMD64 port
- Intel Mac port
- Objective C library interface
- Callbacks from C to Factor
- Restartable exceptions
- Formal stack effect declarations
In my Factor is two years old post, I gave some line number counts for Factor at the time:
- Factor runtime, written in C: 7326 lines
- Factor library, written in Factor: 17591 lines
- Unit test suite, written in Factor: 4160 lines
- Contributed code, written in Factor: 6598 lines
Here are the stats as of today:
- Documentation, written in a Factor DSL: 94347 words
- Factor runtime, written in C: 8261 lines
- Factor library, written in Factor: 29555 lines
- Unit test suite, written in Factor: 4772 lines
- Contributed code, written in Factor: 24737 lines
Good to see the contributed section growing fastest of all. I hope the core library doesn’t get too large, and that a year from now I can look back and say that Factor has again made a lot of progress.