Okay so like... Just how slow is Free?

I'm toying with the idea of re-making a design language we have and expressing it as an algebra in Free.

But then I'm essentially going to be lifting a turing complete language into this context and I have performance concerns.

But the hope is that those performance concerns will still be better than the current approach which involves a lisp interpreter and an xml AST.

The proposed solution would take a JSON encoded program an evaluate it as an algebra.

That said, it would be a challenging thing to encode, and I guess would of necessity encode as a graph?

Because it would have to have cycles.

ANYONE EVER WRITE A TURING COMPLETE JSON ENCODABLE ALGEBRA BEFORE LOL?!

Nobody: "What are you doing?"

Me: "Inventing a programming language."

Nobody: "Cool, what's it compile to?"

Me: "JSON"

Nobody: "Fuck You."

What, your programming languages aren't arbitrarily serializable into essentially every serialization format?

Fucking casual.