West coast trip: 100% success

I got back to Minnesota yesterday. The trip was a lot of fun.

I gave a tech talk at Google. I had less than a week to prepare the talk (we decided to go on short notice) so it was a bit rough but people seemed interested anyway. There were some excellent questions at the end. We hung out in the Bay Area for a few days and met up with many cool people -- Andrew Hintz, Cameron Zwarich, Matthew Willis, Samuel Falvo and Eugene Ciurana.

The VPRI talk in Glendale was even better. It was similar to the Google talk but with some things added and removed. The audience here had more of a background in these types of programming languages so I went a bit faster. Alan Kay attended the talk, which was pretty cool. There was a lot of interesting discussion afterwards with Luke Gorrie, Alessandro Warth, and everyone else whose names I sadly forgot.

At Galois in Portland I only had one hour to present so I had to cut out some of the juicy meat, but it was pretty good anyway. Brian Rice made the trip down from Seattle, and we also got to hang out with Joe Groff, a Factor contributor, and of course Don Stewart and Eric Mertens (another contributor) from Galois. Joe Groff got his friend Jonathan Leto interested in Factor; after we demonstrated Factor's FFI and got some pizza going, he started working on a GSL binding. Cool stuff.

We met lots of interesting people and generated a bit of interest in Factor; lots of new nicknames in #concatenative in the last few days.

Now that I've done enough promotion for the time being, it's time for massive focused action. I'm working on a new low-level optimizer and code generator; this is why I haven't blogged much in the last 3 weeks or so. I first mentioned the new codegen in an older post. Since then, I put it aside to rewrite the high-level optimizer as well; with that out of the way I went back to work on the codegen.

I'll describe it in detail once it is done, but early results are encouraging; performance-wise, as well as the quality and simplicity of the code.

Finally, a photo. Here the #concatenative crew poses in front of Cameron's employer, a somewhat obscure computer company based in Cupertino:

From left to right: Slava, Eduardo, Cameron (cpst), Matthew (yuuki), Doug (erg).