And if anyone is interested in knowing more about Factor, this tutorial is pretty good, from basics to the web development using Furnace (Factor Web Framework) - https://andreaferretti.github.io/factor-tutorial/ :-)
How Factor compiler is different from something like SBCL? It's interesting because Factor have plans to support ARM/Android/iOS, how hard to achieve these goals? It's interesting because Common Lisp's (SBCL, CCL), Scheme (Chez Scheme), Smalltalk (Pharo, Squeak) also have native compiler's, but no one have iOS/Android support, SBCL also have self-contained executables and ARM port. What are the biggest problems to these projects from having iOS/Android support.
The iOS situation is difficult, because Apple does not allow runtime compiled/loaded code in general. LispWorks pre-compiles Lisp code and one creates an App with the help of Apple's Xcode. LispWorks has still an Interpreter at runtime. Generally it is a very complete implementation of Common Lisp (minus the runtime compilation), but without a Lisp-based GUI library. They also had to write a special Garbage Collector for the 64bit ARM iOS. Seems like it was not possible to have their usually more advanced GC, which for example is available with their 64bit ARM Linux port of LispWorks.
That's not exactly Apple's policy - there are React Native apps in the iOS store, and that runs on nodejs. Apple specifically forbids applications that download and run code or allow for other code outside of the application's code to be run. I.e. any and all code that your application will execute has to be submitted with your app.
> On iOS, V8 cannot run because the operating system forbids just-in-time compilation; so instead of V8, we use our own port of the ChakraCore engine, on top of the integration with Node that Microsoft created in Node.js on ChakraCore. ChakraCore has a well-optimized, pure interpreter mode which complies with iOS’ restrictions.
> Apple does not allow Just-In-Time compilation on iOS (except for its own JavaScriptCore engine).
So the claim is that Apple will not allow a third-party Javascript engine which provides a JIT - even though interpreted code engines are allowed and this is what their node.js version did.
My impression is also that this is a technical restriction.
My original title - "Learning binary file formats (work in progress) from flat assembler Author". Someone edited it and I can't change title anymore looks like. :-)
