Factor is now four years old

Time flies! I started working on Factor early September 2003. I can't believe that it has been this long already. I first announced Factor to the Internet in April 2004, after it had already been in development for some time. Here is the original announcement.

In the last year, we had a stready stream of releases, from Factor 0.84 to Factor 0.90, bringing many improvements to functionality, stability and performance. There are also several new contributors on board, which is great. While Factor 1.0 still seems far away, I feel that I'm making good progress and getting closer to achieving my goals.

Here are some code line counts:

• Factor VM (written in C): 10285 lines
• Factor core (written in Factor, core/ directory): 21016 lines
• Factor libraries (written in Factor, extra/ directory): 58853 lines
• Unit tests: 10101 lines
• Documentation: 187405 words

Compared to the stats from last year, we see that:

• the VM has only grown by 2000 lines (yet has evolved considerably in the time)
• the core actually shrank because of better coding practices, and because the UI was moved out of the core
• the amount of contributed libraries has more than doubled!
• the documentation and unit tests have grown considerably too

I think this shows that we're moving in the right direction. I hope to release Factor 1.0 some time next year, and make it a 1.0 release worth the five year wait: an expressive language, with excellent performance, solid libraries, powerful tools and a robust implementation. And after I get a chance to build some large-scale applications with Factor and draw upon the experience gained, the language will continue to evolve into Factor 2.0. Watch out.