Re: Factor

We have a contributor that has been working hard on support for native ARM64 compilation in Factor. Simultaneously, we are working on getting that into the C++ VM as well as the new Zig VM that might eventually replace it in a future version.

I wanted to give a preview now that the native ARM64 version seems to work pretty well on macOS. Now that we are native, we expect significantly improved performance. You can get a sense of that by looking at our “core bootstrap time”:

Using the Intel version with Rosetta2:

Core bootstrap completed in 9 minutes and 6 seconds.

Using the Apple silicon native version:

Core bootstrap completed in 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

It hasn’t yet passed the entire test suite, and is not available yet as a nightly build. But, if you feel adventurous, you can grab the latest development version and bootstrap your own Super Fast Native(tm) version:

$ zig version
0.16.0

$ zig build --release=fast

$ ./factor -i=boot.unix-arm.64.image

$ ./factor
Factor 0.102 arm.64 (2311, heads/master-e4bd6e56b3, Jun  1 2026 14:22:54)
[Zig 0.16.0 ReleaseFast] on macos

Give it a try!