Development Status and History
XL is the result of a long language design work that began around 1992. The language was designed and implemented primarily by Christophe de Dinechin.
Historically, the XL compiler was written in C++. It had achieved a point where most of the features described above worked correctly, but writing plug-ins was a nightmare, because C++ itself is not extensible, so implementing translate-like statements was impossible. The parse tree was more complicated, with dozens of node types, because it was designed for cross-language support. Moka was a Java-to-Java extensible compiler using the same infrastructure.
Abandoning the cross-language objectives and complex parse-tree structure, a complete rewrite of the compiler was started in 2003. The parse tree was vastly simplified down to the 7 XL0 nodes types now in use. This new compiler bootstrapped in 2004, and all new development is now written in XL. However, this new compiler still has somewhat incomplete XL1 support, although its abilities already exceed C++ in a few areas.
Read more about this topic: XL (programming Language)
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