World: r3wp

MonoTouch isn't bad - C# actually turned out to be better than Objective 
C for these kind of things.

That's why so many games for the iPhone are written in C#, on the 
other professional C# dev environment for iPhone: Unity3D.

(.net is bad)  I wonder how they prted .net to the iPhone.

Simple: They didn't. MonoTouch uses iPhone wrapper APIs instead of 
the CLR.

And .NET isn't that bad, depenjding on what you compare it to. Bad 
compared to REBOL - good compared to Java, Flash,  ...

aaaahhh a link just made itself in my head....  novell + mono  <> 
 MS 7 new collaborative mindset... yes...  mono IS .net as an open 
source and actually sanctified by MS as a gift .

so yes, we can actually run .net code on any platform... hell we 
could even import the .net framework and use it in R3 eventually.

(using mono).

And with extensions, we could even call .NET APIs on Windows, such 
as most of the new Vista/7 APIs.

BrainH: is recent Extension API enough to link to .NET, or would 
you welcome some other additions, as utypes, for such an interface?

a lot can already be done right now... probably the most complicated 
aspect is using some of the structs which many of the windows api 
funcs use.

and many functions use callbacks too.  some just to implement "I'm 
done" type async stuff.

so this means we can be as accomplished as vb.net ?

as long as we can map the entire .net spec (probably through mono), 
in theory yes.

Graham - no, not complicated. It is about what reboltutorial suggests 
- how can REBOL be successful, if it can't integrate to business 
systems? Scala is becoming popular. I would like to use REBOL at 
my work. So - how do I query Active Directory, to get me listing 
of users? Bzzz ... you can't easily do such stuff with REBOL. REBOL 
is cool, but a bit in an isolation.

Me too .. I'd like to use a lot of stuff that I simply can't

again, SWIG might be the solution here... this whole topic needs 
a lot of research.

IIRC e.g. Robert is using comlib to access MS Excel API. Without 
it, he could not use REBOL at all for the task given. He does NOT 
code in .NET, he uses its API to get access to systems, apps, and 
their data ...

swig??

a tool which scans entire repositories of C/C++ code and builds bindings 
for various interpreted language... its one of the reasons python 
gets everything first... its totally integrated into SWIG... for 
example, SWIG was used to build the python OpenGL binding.  its just 
a question of getting the .h or the sources.  and then saying... 
I want to use it in [select language].

how big SWIG is? How do you work using it?

http://www.swig.org/

so building an R3 extension output module for it means OTHERS, non 
rebolers could provide the tools for us for free as part of their 
distros.

its not a simple system AFAICT, but a lot of people are using it, 
and its code parser is VERY complete and is used for VERY LARGE projects.

I guess you would build extensions per DLL. one for openGL, one for 
SQLite, one for audio, etc. no crisscrossing?

exactly... in fact, OpenGL provides the .lib files directly, so you 
in fact compile your own OpenGL DLL directly... no need to double 
reference the DLL  :-)

which is what SWIG basically does directly.  once a C library (.lib 
.so or .dll) is mapped to SWIG you can export it into any output 
module you want... since MANY libs have already been setup for SWIG, 
providing an output module for R3 extensions means we'd have access 
to many libraries right away.  no need to do the complicated work, 
just a one-line command saying basically, give me access to that 
for rebol .

The essence would be to make this work as painlessly as possible 
for developers. If it takes to download a single DLL and load it 
with one line of code to make R3 magically do extra stuff, that's 
the way it should be.

1. REBOL 3
2. SQLite
3. Profit!

Sounds like this should be a high priority for the team at Sassenranch 
...

yep. I'm pretty sure SQLite provides the .lib as part of its dev 
distro.. so we could either:

   -build the Rebol-SQLite wrapper as an extension using the static 
   lib so it contains both SQLite itself and the wrapper... 

   -Load the DLL dynamically.  but then if the DLL doesn't match your 
   extension's expected version, it won't load.

welcome to DLL hell  ;-)


this being said if DLL is registered properly, you can ask for a 
specific version and it will be returned since Windows can have multiple 
versions of any DLL installed concurrently.

with callbacks (devices?), there is no need to keep bugging Carl 
about A LOT of things people keep complaining about.  :-)

SQLite ... I am trying my first steps with C language, and I would 
really like to prefer DLL in DLL wrapper. While it might seem as 
being complicated, Ashley's driver uses something like 6-10 functions 
from the whole library? Having wrapped DLL in such a way has a huge 
advantage - each new version of SQLite does not require you to rebuild 
your Extension numbers the platforms you are porting to. And SQLite 
frequent releases are happening quite often ...

we should move to Extensions group ...

ARM announced DualCore 2 GHz A9-Cortex core CPUs, which consume 250mW 
under full load. Impressive. Apple is rumoured to use those CPUs 
in their upcoming tablet device:


http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1533877/dual-core-arm-chips-apple-tablets

Finally devices with battery lasting for several days, not several 
hours, possible? We'll see ... good times ahead :-)

the gfx card is responsible for a lot of the watts being consumed... 
more than any recent cpu in any case.

we can build fanless high-performance CPUs but high-performance fanless 
GPU are still not really a reality afaik

Maxim - you are wrong - nVidia's Tegra based device is claimed to 
offer devices lasting 25 days on battery. We will see :-)

are they shipping yet?

and are they "high-performance"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p69T3cWHBs

looks pretty good.  :-)

holy shit!!!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MnHb0UNsEs&NR=1

real time tracking in 3d space, real-time color-keying.... simultaneously!

finally someone giving the iphone a bit to think about innovation 
 :-)

Google puts forward a new language: Noop:
http://code.google.com/p/noop/

I saw that one - but not all on Google Code is from Google :)

Forget what I said - apparently this one is.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

This is interesting.

Yeah .. let us know if it works