Factor (programming Language) - Implementation and Libraries

Implementation and Libraries

Factor includes a large standard library, written entirely in the language. These include

• A cross-platform GUI toolkit, built on top of OpenGL and various windowing systems, used for the development environment.
• Bindings to several database libraries, including PostgreSQL and SQLite.
• An HTTP server and client, with the Furnace web framework.
• Efficient homogeneous arrays of integers, floats and C structs.
• A library implementing regular expressions, generating machine code to do the matching.

A foreign function interface is built in to Factor, allowing for communication with C, Objective-C and Fortran programs. There is also support for executing and communicating with shaders written in GLSL.

Factor is implemented in Factor and C++. It was originally bootstrapped from an earlier Java implementation. Today, the parser and the optimizing compiler are written in the language. Certain basic parts of the language are implemented in C++ such as the garbage collector and certain primitives.

Factor uses an image-based model, analogous to many Smalltalk implementations, where compiled code and data are stored in an image. To compile a program, the program is loaded into an image and the image is saved. A special tool assists in the process of creating a minimal image to run a particular program, packaging the result into something that can be deployed as a standalone application.

The Factor compiler implements many advanced optimizations and has been used as a target for research in new optimization techniques.