World: r3wp

Is there anything others can do to speed up the development of Red?

A lot, I'd say. Enhance Red, write bindings, write example programs, 
write documentation. etc.

Doc says he is starting soon on Red ?

He has started months ago with the memory allocator and the tokeniser, 
but Red/System keeps postponing the rest

On the other hand, implementing things such as the allocator yields 
experience for further developing Red/System

If you don't think you can create a contribution with time, you could 
make a donation in money

Kaj - donation is not a problem imo. I donated and will donate again 
in March. At least a bit, but the question is, if it can speed anything, 
apart from the fact, that Doc will be able to work on the Red fulltime 
eventually. I think that Graham might be in a position of need to 
work on new stuff, and is deciding what tool should he use. In such 
a case, it is a bit preliminary to consider Red imo. But who knows, 
how quickly the RED itself can be written.

We will have to wait for Doc's estimate. It is also a question, if, 
when implementing e.g. Red "natives", he will accept the work of 
other developers, or will want to write it himself.

I am also not sure, that in the case of Red, eventual R3 source release 
would help to speed things up, as Red "natives" are going to be written 
in Red/System, not C, or so is my understanding of the platform.

I don't think any R3 development could speed up Red, but R2/Forward 
may

I had something other in mind - RT releasing sources for R3, it might 
be easier for Doc to rewrite R3 C code into Red/System, than implementing 
all functions "from scratch".

Perhaps with some functions, but in general probably not. REBOL C 
code will be very R3 specific. Interfacing with external systems 
is still sparse, and those examples can be looked up in many other 
projects

Also, the plan is to implement as few functions as possible in Red/System. 
Red will be preferred instead, to work at a higher level

And I take it we are not waiting for Red/System to be rewritten in 
Red/system before work on red starts?

So a few natives get written in R/S, and then use those to write 
the core of Red.  And those that need to be rewritten in R/s can 
be done as a later optimization.

I think that's the plan. World has similar goals I believe.

And in a few years we'll be able to write apps :)

An incentive to live a little longer. :-)

I don't think any R3 development could speed up Red

 - perhaps only already taken design decisions, as design can take 
 time and mistakes can be made.

A few points releting to recent posts:

Nenad is already working fulltime on Red.


He has already accepted contributions to the Red/System compiler 
from both Andreas and Oldes.


Finding bugs by using Red/System will help speed the process of Red 
especially as Nenad's current design is to generate Red/System code 
from Red.

Yes, design decisions are important, but we were talking about potential 
new R3 development

Graham, programs can be written in Red/System right now

You were asking what anyone can do to help, and the most obvious 
way is writing programs

Ok, though I can't think of anything I need to write in R/S at present. 
 I need GUI based apps though

if one wants to test Red/System: port some simple C stuff?

FYI, I'm on trip until Saturday, so I won't be able to work much 
on Red until there. I will try anyway to release the version 0.2.4 
that includes floats support this week.

Speed up the process: you'll be able to add easily new datatypes 
to Red. I won't code myself all the 50+ REBOL datatypes, only the 
basic and important ones. For example, I would very much appreciate 
if date! and time! could be contributed by someone. The basic types 
will be quick to add as soon as the underlying Red runtime (think 
MAKE, LOAD and a few basic natives) will be operational.

Is there going to be a central repository for code snippets like 
rebol.org ?

Certainly, maybe we could use a github repo for that as a start?

And use google to index

Right, or build a simple search service using github's public API.

After adding the float! support, the main thing is a series! datatyte. 
Should we wait for Red to implement it properly or do we want ti 
in red/system as well? (I know I can use pointer math to access values, 
but it's not so easy for ordinary scripting)

Red/System is not meant for scripting but low-level and system programming. 
Red is for scripting, so series! support as well as all others scripting 
facilites will be provided by Red.

So what one can do now to help you move Red to usable state? :)

Red/System: already anwsered by me, Kaj and others (also, there's 
a todo list on red-lang.org for contributors that are searching for 
tasks to handle).

Red: you need to wait a few weeks until the first alpha is out to 
start adding new datatypes.

todo list - you mean the roadmap?

No, the one from here: http://www.red-lang.org/p/contributions.html

(it's the "Community" menu, I guess I forgot to rename the page, 
will have to fix that)

@Oldes .. how about a black text on white background blogger theme! 
 That would help a lot.

It does not sound like much creative work... you can just download 
some existing theme like http://www.bloggerthemes.net/heliumified/demo
and tweek it a little bit... but it requires access to the site.

I very much like the Heroku style: http://www.heroku.comIf I could 
find a similar blogger theme, I would switch at once.

I'm aware that the current theme is not always very readable, if 
someone with good design and CSS skills wants to tweak it, I'll see 
if I can give you access to the admin form.

I can agree with Oldes, that when wrapping some C stuff, things like 
series would be handy - namely - a block! type, to have an array, 
plus accompanying series handling functions. But - where would that 
end? :-) Wouldn't we then want also a path, etc. to work?

I am for a quick solution to appear, so - Red. If that turns out 
being slow, there is a later chance to reimplement some stuff in 
Red/System. Of course such aproach itself does not bring more comfort 
to Red/System, as e.g. availability of array type would be for e.g. 
But there are some priorities ....

Arrays are possible in reds, just it's not so clear like in Rebol:) 
Example:

	*count: declare int-ptr!
	query: MagickQueryFormats "*" *count
	count: *count/value

	?? ["======================================"]
	?? ["=== Supported image formats: " count   ]
	
	while [count > 0][
		?? query/item
		query: query + 1
		count: count - 1
	]

Ok, though I can't think of anything I need to write in R/S at present. 
 I need GUI based apps though

A cross-platform GTK+ binding is available, with a REBOL like dialect

if one wants to test Red/System: port some simple C stuff?

Yes, that's a good approach