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.