Factor/Goals

The goals of the Factor project are to build a Concatenative Language and Interactive Environment suitable for the development of large-scale applications. Specifically,

• Factor should support powerful, orthogonal and well-designed Language features. Boilerplate should not be tolerated.
• Factor should be fast, without requiring undue effort on the part of the developer. As much as possible, the compiler should infer the developer's intent and make common idioms fast; type hints should be supported but only relied upon as a matter of last resort. Using Unsafe words should never be a requirement for achieving high performance. See Factor compiler.
• Factor should be robust. Unit testing, Continuous integration and Static analysis should be employed as much as possible to ensure the robustness of the implementation.
• Software written in Factor should be robust. Factor avoid language features which encourage Fragile code, and the language should make it easy to achieve Code reuse and Encapsulation.
• Factor should have a large set of libraries for common programming tasks, such as parsing XML, writing web applications, 2D and 3D graphics, database access, sockets, and so on. These libraries should be well-tested, well-documented and ship with Factor.
• Factor should include powerful developer tools to automate some of the drudgery in maintaining larger code bases.
• Factor should include top-notch documentation, accessible from within the development environment itself, to aid beginners and experts like. See Help system.