After a long hiatus while I built Text Collector, last week I finally returned to my paradigm shifting language, Comefrom0x10. It now has a home page on Read the Docs that features a tutorial, standard library documentation and more.

Except for a couple minor bugs, its implementation was actually functionally complete eight months ago. I hesitated to release it, however, because of rather embarrassing performance problems.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Cf0x10 is just slow. It’s catastrophically slow. The brainfuck.cf0x10 program takes 10 seconds to run helloworld.b on the laptop I’m using to write this, and gets dramatically worse as the program gets longer.

What went wrong?

It’s not a fundamental problem with the comefrom paradigm, but a consequence of the twisted way the language took on a life of its own during implementation. I started with the idea that I was building a rather ordinary stack-based interpreter, but Cf0x10 would have none of it. As it evolved, the original idea became a disfigured mutant: I can demonstrate with tests that it works, but it’s too convoluted to allow necessary optimizations.

Oh well, as they say, first make it right, then make it fast release it.