[jesserayadkins2]

Thanks!

I started Lily to be an alternative to PHP. The first commit was adding templating support, and it was a while before the language could be standalone.

I had two requirements when creating and designing Lily:

One, that the language had to be interpreted. I didn't want to offer people an alternative to PHP but then tell them that they would need to repeatedly run compile passes over it. Facebook has HipHop, and it transforms PHP into C++. I wanted a language that could be used like PHP, but having a faster interpreter wasn't enough.

The other requirement was to have a statically-typed language. I believed that a statically-typed language would lend itself to better transformation into a lower-level language. In theory, an llvm frontend might also be writable that took Lily as input.

I wanted Lily to outperform PHP both when interpreted, and when compiled. Over time, the focus broadened once I realized Lily's low memory usage, and how fast the turnaround of the parser is.

[codezero]

Awesome, thanks for sharing this!