Felix Programming Language 1.1.1 review

Felix is an advanced Algol like procedural programming language with a strong functional subsystem

License: Freely Distributable File size: 1100K Developer: skaller

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Felix is an advanced Algol like procedural programming language with a strong functional subsystem. It features ML style typing, first class functions, pattern matching, garabge collection, polymorphism, and has built in support for high performance microthreading, regular expressions and context free parsing.

The system provides a scripting harness so the language can be used like other scripting languages, but underneath it generates native code to obtain high performance.

A key feature of the system is that it uses the C++ object model, and provides an advanced binding sublanguage to support integration with C++ at both the source and object levels, both for embedding C++ data types and functions into Felix, and for embedding Felix into exitsing C++ architectures.

The Felix compiler is written in Objective Caml, and generates ISO C++ which should compile on any platform.

Requirements:
Ocaml 3.08 to build the Felix compiler,
Python to run the build scripts,
A C++ compiler. The build script is preset to use GNU g++.


Installation

To bootstrap the build, type

./configure

on the command line to unpack the build scripts and makefile. You may need to edit the files

config/*.py
to suit your platform.

You should now be able to:

make
make doc

Become superuser and type

make install

to install the system, by default in /usr/local/lib/felix, the scripting driver harness in /usr/local/bin, and the man pages in /usr/local/man. If these install points are not suitable for your system, you'll have to edit the config/config.py file.

What's New in This Release:
This version includes a complete rewrite of the configuration system to support two stage cross compilation modelling.
The source now builds out of the box on Linux, OSX, Cygwin, MinGW, and Win32.
A Debian package is now available in the Debian archive.
There are miscellaneous extensions to the standard library, significant performance improvements, enhancement of the code quotation mechanism, more C code annotations, and improvements to the type system.
The Web site now boasts a wiki and display of graphs comparing performance.