Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Factor 0.98 now available

“Even though you're growing up, you should never stop having fun.” - Nina Dobrev

I'm very pleased to announce the release of Factor 0.98!

OS/CPUWindowsMac OS XLinux
x86
0.98
0.98
0.98
x86-64
0.98
0.98
0.98

Source code: 0.98

This release is brought to you with almost 4,300 commits by the following individuals:

Alexander Ilin, Arkady Rost, Benjamin Pollack, Björn Lindqvist, Cat Stevens, Chris Double, Dimage Sapelkin, Doug Coleman, Friedrich von Never, John Benediktsson, Jon Harper, Mark Green, Mark Sweeney, Nicolas Pénet, Philip Dexter, Robert Vollmert, Samuel Tardieu, Sankaranarayanan Viswanathan, Shane Pelletier, @catb0t, @hyphz, @thron7, @xzenf

Besides several years of bug fixes and library improvements, I want to highlight the following changes:

  • Improved user interface with light and dark themes and new icons
  • Fix GTK library issue affecting some Linux installations
  • Support Cocoa TouchBar on MacOS
  • Factor REPL version banner includes build information.
  • Bindings for ForestDB
  • New graphical demos including Minesweeper, Game of Life, Bubble Chamber, etc.
  • Better handling of "out of memory" errors
  • Improved VM and compiler documentation, test fixtures, and bug fixes
  • Much faster Heaps and Heapsort
  • Support for Adobe Brackets, CotEditor, and Microsoft Visual Studio Code editors
  • On Mac OS X, allow use of symlinks to factor binary
  • Lots of improvements to FUEL (Factor's emacs mode)

Some possible backwards compatibility issues:

  • Flattened unicode namespace (either USE: ascii or USE: unicode).
  • Unified CONSTRUCTOR: syntax to include generated word name
  • Returning a struct by value with two register-sized values on 64bit now works correctly
  • Since shutdown hooks run first, calling exit will now unconditionally exit even if there is an error
  • On Windows, don't call cd to change directory when launching processes; there is another mechanism for that
  • In libc, renamed (io-error) to throw-errno
  • In match, renamed ?1-tail to ?rest
  • In sequences, renamed iota to <iota>
  • In sequences, renamed start/start* to subseq-start/subseq-start-from
  • In syntax, renamed GENERIC# to GENERIC#:
  • Improve command-line argument parsing of "executable"
  • Make buffered-port not have a length, because of problem with Linux virtual files and TCP sockets
  • Fix broken optimization that made floats work for integer keys in case statements
  • Growable sequences expand by factor of 2 (instead of 3) when growing
  • Removed support for "triple-quote" strings

What is Factor

Factor is a concatenative, stack-based programming language with high-level features including dynamic types, extensible syntax, macros, and garbage collection. On a practical side, Factor has a full-featured library, supports many different platforms, and has been extensively documented.

The implementation is fully compiled for performance, while still supporting interactive development. Factor applications are portable between all common platforms. Factor can deploy stand-alone applications on all platforms. Full source code for the Factor project is available under a BSD license.


New Libraries:


Improved Libraries:

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