Cross-platform Factor Install Script

Recently, I wrote an installer/updater bash script that downloads the git repository, compiles, and bootstraps Factor. On Linux, it compiles Factor for console-only if any of the libraries required for the graphical interface are missing (freetype, GL, GLU, X11).

To install Factor to a directory: ./factor.sh install
To update your Factor repository: ./misc/factor.sh update

The script source code is available for browsing or for download.

Tested on Windows XP/Vista in Cygwin, Debian and Ubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X.

Please send bug reports and improvements. Thanks!

Where's my Raptor!??

My Macbook's dock displayed the default icon instead of a raptor. The fix was to move the move the .app directory to another name, then to move it back. Now I have a raptor!

Does 10.4 do some caching? It probably had it cached wrong since we got the new icon.

Doubly-linked Lists, Queues, and Heaps

Doubly-linked Lists and Queues

Factor has had doubly-linked lists for years now, but they were not well-documented or polished. Now, they're documented and have replaced the queues library.

An example of a dlist usage:

<dlist> "red" over push-front "blue" over push-front dup pop-back .
    "red"

You can add/remove nodes of a dlist with push-front, push-back, pop-front, pop-back, delete-node, and search with dlist-find, dlist-contains?.

Finding the length of a dlist is O(1) since it stores the length as dlist-length, a tuple slot.

Heaps

Heaps have been updated to allow for <min-heap> and <max-heap> data structures. Adding elements to a heap is achieved with heap-push ( value key heap -- ), while popping elements is heap-pop ( heap -- value key ).

Factor's green threads implementation had been using a hack for the sleep-queue: each time a new entry was added it would modify a non-growable array, which would then be sorted by the smallest timeout. Adding a sequence of sleep continuations would take O(n^2 log n) time! Running 10000 [ [ 100 sleep ] in-thread ] times should spawn 10000 threads and sleep for 100 ms in each one, and with the old sleep-queue implementation it takes over a minute on my Macbook. Now it's just O(n log n), which takes a second or two.