Friday, September 01, 2006

Factor is now three years old

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

great job!

Berlin Brown Discussions said...

Slava is a bad ass, enough said. Still have barely used factor. Once I read about it in a magazine, I will probably start using it more.