I tried to write (in C) a PostScript byte compiler for a grad school project. It is a very appealing language to work with, with the simplicity of stack machine. And like with this post, I didn't get into the graphical elements that make PostScript useful.

Mainly I learned that Ghostscript is doing a lot to make its PostScript interpreter fast: with the non-graphical test programs I could think up, GhostScript was many times faster interpreting the program (even computationally intensive ones) than my runtime (called "egon") could execute the byte-compiled PostScript. So it was a computation fail but still a pedagogy win.

I've always been meaning to learn more about how Ghostscript is engineered.