Overview of Fan’s architecture

Fan’s philosophy

Unlike traditional programming languages, Fan is a set of languages which can evolve itself incrementally. It gets started from the vanilla OCaml language as Fan₀, with more and more new languages added for each version.

For example, to add a new DSL into Fan_n, we would supply a front-end and a back-end targeted at Fan_n, upon being integrated, Fan_n becomes Fan_n+1.

We can grow Fan endlessly in such a way, however, the main interesting part for Fan is not that me, the main developer of Fan can keep adding features to it, its interesting point lies in the following two aspects:

1. It encourages the programmer to think about programming in a bottom-up way. Unlike the traditional problem-oriented approach, language-oriented programming is encouraged: delimited domain specific language([[file:ddsl.org][DDSL]]) is the best abstraction for a specific domain.
2. Everyone, including you: the reader, can join and develop a mini-compiler and share with other people. Fan servers as a platform to glue them tegether.