Factor Language Blog

Factor 0.90 is now available. The web site hasn’t been updated yet, so you can’t browse the docs online right now; so instead just download it and read the docs in the UI!

Lots of changes:
Core

• New module system. (Eduardo Cavazos)
• Tuple constructors are defined differently now.
• Mixin classes implemented; these are essentially extensible unions.
• New float-array data type implements a space-efficient sequence of floats.
• Moved <file-appender>, delete-file, make-directory, delete-directory words from libs/io into the core, and fixed them to work on more platforms.
• New host-name word.
• The directory word now outputs an array of pairs, with the second element of each pair indicating if that entry is a subdirectory. This saves an unnecessary stat call when traversing directory hierarchies, which speeds things up.
• IPv6 is now supported, along with Unix domain sockets (the latter on Unix systems only). The stack effects of <client> and <server> have changed, since they now take generic address specifiers; see Networking.
• The stage 2 bootstrap process is more flexible, and various subsystems such as help, tools and the UI can be omitted by supplying command line switches; see Command line switches for bootstrap.
• The -shell command line switch has been replaced by a -run command line switch; see Command line switches for general usage.
• Variable usage inference has been removed; the infer word no longer reports this information.

Tools

• Stand-alone image deployment in tools.deploy vocabulary .
• Stand-alone application bundle deployment on Mac OS X in tools.deploy.app vocabulary.
• New vocabulary browser tool in the UI.
• New profiler tool in the UI.

Extras

• asn1: ASN1 parser and writer. (Elie Chaftari)
• benchmarks: new set of benchmarks.
• cfdg: Context-free design grammar implementation; see http://www.chriscoyne.com/cfdg/. (Eduardo Cavazos)
• cryptlib: Cryptlib library binding. (Elie Chaftari)
• cryptlib.streams: Streams which perform SSL encryption and decryption. (Matthew Willis)
• hints: Give type specialization hints to the compiler.
• inverse: Invertible computation and concatenative pattern matching. (Daniel Ehrenberg)
• ldap: OpenLDAP library binding. (Elie Chaftari)
• locals: Efficient lexically scoped locals, closures, and local words.
• mortar: Experimental message-passing object system. (Eduardo Cavazos)
• openssl: OpenSSL library binding. (Elie Chaftari)
• pack: Utility for reading and writing binary data. (Doug Coleman)
• pdf: Haru PDF library binding. (Elie Chaftari)
• qualified: Refer to words from another vocabulary without adding the entire vocabulary to the search path. (Daniel Ehrenberg)
• roman: Reading and writing Roman numerals. (Doug Coleman)
• scite: SciTE editor integration. (Clemens Hofreither)
• smtp: SMTP client with support for CRAM-MD5 authentication. (Elie Chaftari, Dirk Vleugels)
• tuple-arrays: Space-efficient packed tuple arrays. (Daniel Ehrenberg)
• unicode: major new functionality added. (Daniel Ehrenberg)

Performance

• The curry word now runs in constant time, and curried quotations can be called from compiled code; this allows for abstractions and idioms which were previously impractical due to performance issues. In particular, words such as each-with and map-with are gone; each-with can now be written as curry* each, and similarly for other -with combinators.
• Improved generational promotion strategy in garbage collector reduces the amount of junk which makes its way into tenured space, which in turn reduces the frequency of full garbage collections.
• Faster generic word dispatch and union membership testing.
• Alien memory accessors are compiled as intrinsics where possible, which improves performance in code which iteroperates with C libraries.

Platforms

• Networking support added for Windows CE. (Doug Coleman)
• UDP/IP networking support added for all Windows platforms. (Doug Coleman)
• Solaris/x86 fixes. (Samuel Tardieu)
• Linux/AMD64 port works again.

A big thank you to all the contributors and testers who made this release possible.