[skaller]

The historical answer is that originally Felix programs were being written for the Shootout and the compiler was upgraded so it performed well. In fact it trashed everything. Then control of the Shootout changed hands and Felix got dropped by the new manager. Today, there are no forums for developing new languages.

Felix "targets" people that would like to use Haskell or Ocaml but have a ton of code in C and C++ to interface with. Felix is a C++ upgrade: it discard the syntax, but retains ABI compatibility, at quite some cost to things like safety for example.

Felix is more or less guaranteed to perform on par with C/C++ or better for the simple reason you can embed C++ directly into Felix, this works because Felix generates C++. And of course you can link to your favourite libraries with minimal syntax.

  type mytype = "My::Type";
  ctor mytype : int = "My::Type ($1)";
  fun addup : mytype * mytype -> mytype = "$1.addup($2)";

Unlike Ocaml which requires a lot of hard to write glue logic, Felix and C++ share types and functions. Typically only type glue is required to create a bridge.

[thinkpad20]

No forums for developing new languages? Seems like Go, Nimrod, Rust, D, CoffeeScript and many other relatively new languages have large and active development.

That's interesting that they were booted from the shootout. I wonder what happened there. Anyway, I haven't really looked at this enough to see how its features really play out, but on the surface it looks great. Certainly as an alternative to C++ it sounds miles ahead, and indeed many of the languages being developed today are intended precisely as alternatived to C++. A guarantee of C/C++ performance or better is very enticing. :)

[srean]

I think skaller meant that there is no common shared forum for (new) languages. Well, there is LTU but the discussion there tends towards the theoretical side, its focus is language implementers rather than language users. The language game site used to be one place a user could get exposed to different languages. It has largely become autocratic, arbitrary and "dont tell me how to spend my free time"hostile in the sense language gets dropped from the list for no clear reason. I think it has stopped being the de facto go to place for language comparison as well, not sure of the latter.