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UPDATE (12-Mar-2014):

All sites are back: factorcode, planet-factor, builds.factorcode, and concatenative. Downloads are back. Looks like the sites were moved to a different host (Rackspace?) and quite significantly revamped.

(This can question can be considered closed.)

I've been trying to get a recent Windows binary of the Factor programming language, but it has been confounded by the fact that the factorcode.org website appears to be down.

Unfortunately, all download links seem to point back to it, specifically to builds.factorcode.org.

I don't know how long it's been this way, but it seems not to be the first time... It looks like it's been down since the start of March, and there's noise about this in October, and again in December.

As Factor is open-source, I was hoping that binaries might be mirrored somewhere else. But what used to be on SourceForge appears to have been removed to factorcode.org, and the main GitHub repository for Factor also seems to be hosted on factorcode.org.

How do I obtain binaries? It there perhaps another way?

(P.S.: these related sites are also down: Concatenative.org and Planet Factor.)

I have used Forth a fair amount and recently have been hearing more about Factor. Given that Google seems to have hired Slava Pestov (creator of Factor) and Daniel Ehrenberg (collaborator with Slava on developing Factor), thought I'd see what the buzz is about -- 'kick the tyres' so to speak.

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Assad Ebrahim
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    George: the problem is: How to get a hold of a Factor binary since the primary (only?) source of these appears to have disappeared. Done so far: scour the web and find that all download links point back to the disappeared site. I think this is a question that can benefit from the broad audience of Stack Overflow. Hopefully someone knows of a source, or make a binary available through other channels. – Assad Ebrahim Mar 08 '14 at 05:52
  • I'm cloning the git repo now, so that's working at least. – jcomeau_ictx Mar 09 '14 at 19:48
  • I've also emailed the tech contact for the domain. – jcomeau_ictx Mar 09 '14 at 20:03
  • @jcomeau_ictx: Thanks. Let us know what you find. Is it just me, or does it seem odd that the main site goes down for an extended period of time and no one seems to care? Doesn't look good for a language that wants to be "open for business"... – Assad Ebrahim Mar 09 '14 at 20:08
  • not odd, really. people have priorities, and perhaps the developers' priorities are in working on the language itself -- the latest git commit was two days ago -- and let others worry about building from source. – jcomeau_ictx Mar 09 '14 at 20:10
  • you can build it using the working download (clone or zip file) from github, and the free Windows SDK downloadable from Microsoft. I didn't want to install git on windows, so I edited out the 3 lines in build_support\factor.cmd that related to auto-updating the source. – jcomeau_ictx Mar 10 '14 at 00:11

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