The cross-platform UI that Factor has works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. On Linux, it unfortunately still uses a GTK2-GLext project for the OpenGL widget that we render into, but modern GTK3/4 has a Gtk.GlArea that we need to switch to using which will improve the compatibility on Wayland. However, it works fine with even the latest Ubuntu 25.10 release.
And of course, you could use other libraries easily, such as Raylib:
I'm a bit biased as I've been working on and with Factor for 15 years and I am also the author of the linked article and "Re: Factor" blog.
I find Factor to have a compelling sweet spot of concise syntax, dynamic features, and (relatively) high performance. But in particular, I think we've done a good job with a few things:
1) Making the language very "clickable", so you can introspect and dig down into all function and type definitions.
2) Provide a lot of batteries-included in the standard library.
3) Make it super easy to accept contributions, there's a part of the distribution that is "extra" and has low barrier to entry and then we commit to keeping code working and promoting things to the main standard library when they are useful/documented/tested enough.
It won’t actually argue all sides of an issue. Take any controversial one, and it stays inside its guardrails no matter which opinion you want it to counter.
We did start a conversation about building a package manager, but have not had anyone champion this as a project. I admit to being a little lazy about this due to including so much code in the main repository.
The releases have varied over the years from less than a year, to almost two years between "releases". For some historical context:
0.93 was released April 16, 2010.
0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months).
0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits).
0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits).
0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits).
The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm.
A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.