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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Smalltalk in Factor
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While discussing Smalltalk minutiae with Dan and Avi Bryant, we hit upon the idea of trying to compile Smalltalk down to Factor. After all, Factor already has everything you'd want in a platform for hosting languages. We have a great optimizing compiler, a generational garbage collector, C FFI, a ton of libraries, and so on; in theory we've already done most of the hard work for someone who wants to make a language without dealing with low-level details. So while we've written countless DSLs in Factor since the very beginning, why not try implementing a more complete language?
There are some interesting details on what was done (and how) - but there's a Smalltalk implementation for Factor now.