A cursory look at the website and Googling says the latter, which is a shame. The research would be more impactful with source code. There's no reason not to release the source, and if you fail to do so, you can't really complain if practitioners don't pick up those techniques :)
I think OMeta was related and that is released, but IMO it's not that practical.
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Thread from 5 years ago that is not that flattering of their work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325
Oh it actually points to some more source: https://github.com/damelang/nile
Although I think it's easy to pick on different parts; there's definitely value to having a holistic system and design. But it would be better if we could see all of it instead of just the parts
See Casey Muratory on the 30 million lines problem: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031
Solve that, and then ideas from VPRI can shine.