5 ms·

Factor 0.97 now available

92 points by otoburb 12y ago

Dewie 12y ago
Factor seems to be the only modern[1], mature, actively developed concatenative language right now. But I'm not really a concatenator so I can't tell for sure. [1] Though maybe some Forths can be considered modern.
- bjz_ 12y ago
  Kitten is an exciting, actively developed, statically typed concatenative lang: http://kittenlang.org/ http://kittenlang.org/
  - Dewie 12y ago
    Yeah, I hope evincarofautumn keeps chugging along with it. Last I saw I liked the ideas/philosophy behind it. Nice to see that the front page has a more interesting code example than last time I checked the website out. Readable use of matrices must be one of the biggest doubts that people in general have when it comes to what concatenative languages can pull of cleanly.
  - klibertp 12y ago
    Is it somehow related to Cat language (http://www.cat-language.com/ http://www.cat-language.com/)?
    - klibertp 12y ago
      Yup, it is. From the FAQ: "It’s also intended to be a practical successor to Cat, which was the first statically typed concatenative language."
- huehue 12y ago
  People interested in both array/APL-like and concatenative languages might want to take a look at lang5.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
aaron-lebo 12y ago
5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay? (not a criticism, just a question)
- otoburb 12y ago
  0.96 was released April 20, 2013[1] and was rather solid to use. Glad to hear that it received a fair amount of hype before (I wasn't aware of that myself -- perhaps I missed that phase). Most languages seem to release rapidly as 'low-hanging fruit' features are worked on, and then seem to plateau as major releases get longer and longer in between. Factor came to my attention during the 0.94 release in 2010, which was solid enough to learn Factor in a great IDE. I wish that I'd had more time to invest more seriously over the years, but am extremely glad that it's still being actively worked on. You can tell this from the Factor github commit log[2]. As far as I'm aware, since the community is rather small, most people that code in Factor don't bother much with the release numbers and just compile their images straight from github as commits are made. The "releases" are done more as a public milestone. [1] http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-available.html http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-availa... [2] https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master
- mrjbq7 12y ago
  The releases have varied over the years from less than a year, to almost two years between "releases". For some historical context: 0.93 was released April 16, 2010. 0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months). 0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits). 0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits). 0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits). The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm. A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.
mschaef 12y ago
I'm glad to see that Factor is regaining some momentum. It made such good progress early on that it would be a shame if development didn't continue.
rtpg 12y ago
always been interested in learning a stack based language, but have been unsure about what sort of programs are interesting to build with this.
- gre 12y ago
  Factor is general-purpose and you can write most anything you want at this point. Here's tar in Factor: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tar/tar.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tar/... For untarring the linux kernel, Factor tar beats /usr/bin/tar on my Mac by 1s, but 30s vs 6s on Linux for some reason. Could be SSD vs spinning disk, or worse i/o code on Linux. Funnily, there are about 10 files that differ in case only, and Mac file system is case-insensitive by default, so you can't even untar the linux kernel correctly. Here's host using the dns client library: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tools/dns/dns.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tool... https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/dns/dns.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/dns/... I wrote it because gethostbyname is blocking and Factor has nonblocking i/o for everything else. There's a cross-platform disk usage tool that outputs the same stuff as df but works on Windows too: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/tools/files/files.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/tool... USE: tools.files file-systems. There's a high-level library for doing whatever you want with unix users/groups: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix/users/users-tests.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix... effective-user-name [ ] with-effective-user effective-user-id [ ] with-effective-user all-users https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix/groups/groups-tests.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix... effective-group-name [ ] with-effective-group effective-group-id [ ] with-effective-group all-groups Graphics demo--raytraced spheres using GLSL on a checkerboard pattern, spheres each play their own music: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/tree/master/extra/gpu/demos/raytrace https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/tree/master/extra/gpu/... https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/gpu/demos/raytrace/raytrace.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/gpu/... The main file that sets up the world and loads the shaders and sound is 130 lines and reuses the game library.
- 12y ago
fithisux 12y ago
Will we ever see a humane J-language binding? I would like to use it Factor-like. Congrats for the release.

92 points by otoburb 12y ago

Dewie 12y ago

Factor seems to be the only modern[1], mature, actively developed concatenative language right now. But I'm not really a concatenator so I can't tell for sure. [1] Though maybe some Forths can be considered modern.

bjz_ 12y ago
Kitten is an exciting, actively developed, statically typed concatenative lang: http://kittenlang.org/ http://kittenlang.org/
- Dewie 12y ago
  Yeah, I hope evincarofautumn keeps chugging along with it. Last I saw I liked the ideas/philosophy behind it. Nice to see that the front page has a more interesting code example than last time I checked the website out. Readable use of matrices must be one of the biggest doubts that people in general have when it comes to what concatenative languages can pull of cleanly.
- klibertp 12y ago
  Is it somehow related to Cat language (http://www.cat-language.com/ http://www.cat-language.com/)?
  - klibertp 12y ago
    Yup, it is. From the FAQ: "It’s also intended to be a practical successor to Cat, which was the first statically typed concatenative language."
huehue 12y ago
People interested in both array/APL-like and concatenative languages might want to take a look at lang5.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

aaron-lebo 12y ago

5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay? (not a criticism, just a question)

otoburb 12y ago
0.96 was released April 20, 2013[1] and was rather solid to use. Glad to hear that it received a fair amount of hype before (I wasn't aware of that myself -- perhaps I missed that phase). Most languages seem to release rapidly as 'low-hanging fruit' features are worked on, and then seem to plateau as major releases get longer and longer in between. Factor came to my attention during the 0.94 release in 2010, which was solid enough to learn Factor in a great IDE. I wish that I'd had more time to invest more seriously over the years, but am extremely glad that it's still being actively worked on. You can tell this from the Factor github commit log[2]. As far as I'm aware, since the community is rather small, most people that code in Factor don't bother much with the release numbers and just compile their images straight from github as commits are made. The "releases" are done more as a public milestone. [1] http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-available.html http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-availa... [2] https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master
mrjbq7 12y ago
The releases have varied over the years from less than a year, to almost two years between "releases". For some historical context: 0.93 was released April 16, 2010. 0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months). 0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits). 0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits). 0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits). The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm. A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.

mschaef 12y ago

I'm glad to see that Factor is regaining some momentum. It made such good progress early on that it would be a shame if development didn't continue.

rtpg 12y ago

always been interested in learning a stack based language, but have been unsure about what sort of programs are interesting to build with this.

gre 12y ago
Factor is general-purpose and you can write most anything you want at this point. Here's tar in Factor: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tar/tar.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tar/... For untarring the linux kernel, Factor tar beats /usr/bin/tar on my Mac by 1s, but 30s vs 6s on Linux for some reason. Could be SSD vs spinning disk, or worse i/o code on Linux. Funnily, there are about 10 files that differ in case only, and Mac file system is case-insensitive by default, so you can't even untar the linux kernel correctly. Here's host using the dns client library: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tools/dns/dns.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/tool... https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/dns/dns.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/dns/... I wrote it because gethostbyname is blocking and Factor has nonblocking i/o for everything else. There's a cross-platform disk usage tool that outputs the same stuff as df but works on Windows too: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/tools/files/files.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/tool... USE: tools.files file-systems. There's a high-level library for doing whatever you want with unix users/groups: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix/users/users-tests.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix... effective-user-name [ ] with-effective-user effective-user-id [ ] with-effective-user all-users https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix/groups/groups-tests.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/basis/unix... effective-group-name [ ] with-effective-group effective-group-id [ ] with-effective-group all-groups Graphics demo--raytraced spheres using GLSL on a checkerboard pattern, spheres each play their own music: https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/tree/master/extra/gpu/demos/raytrace https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/tree/master/extra/gpu/... https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/gpu/demos/raytrace/raytrace.factor https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/gpu/... The main file that sets up the world and loads the shaders and sound is 130 lines and reuses the game library.
12y ago

fithisux 12y ago

Will we ever see a humane J-language binding? I would like to use it Factor-like. Congrats for the release.