World: r3wp

My Cerebrus wasn't really a virus scanner .. if that's what you meant

It did look for  base64 encoded signatures though in the body of 
the mail

My mistake, I was always under the impression that you meant those 
signatures to encode for viruses...

So it wasn't a misspelling of Cerberus?

I guess it's a matter of choice how one spells things and also better 
to avoid other products with the same name but different spelling.

Yes, it was to search for viruses but I think it was because there 
was a particular flurry of some viruses at that time so I thought 
it would be easy enough to add ...

just to scan for those ones

But it was primarily an antispam engine

Good, then my record is clean: I've never run a virus scanner in 
my life :-)

I'm wondering if it would be possible to get the R3 DLL interface 
into R2 without big trouble?

what do you mean by R3 DLL interface? Whole extension stuff? I think 
it might be easier to finish R3 :-) In both cases though, we need 
Carl :-)

Yes, the DLL interface.

well, I don't understand - there is no DLL interface for R3, is there? 
I do remember some related bounty, Max started some work, but it 
was not finished. Anyway - as I said - R2 = only Carl can do it?

is Carl still alive?

Oldes - according to his mendoradio blog, he still is http://mendoradio.wordpress.com/
 .... noone knows though, when and if ever his new linux related 
job ends, and what does it mean for the REBOL future ...

Seems to be complicated: I wonder if the R3 extension interface can 
be brought to R2 to make it simpler to use DLLs. Now clear?

Robert - absolutly .....

Hmm, maybe a reverse question - what is missing in R3 in order to 
use it instead of R2? Just curious ....

Legacy code. Our products are R2 based and I want to use the same 
extensions. At the moment I have to handle code differences on the 
C side which I would like to avoid.

Sounds logical then.

It would be messy. R2 can't be touched, so it would have to be done 
through the Library interface. That's less powerful than the R3 extensions 
interface, so you'd have to develop a separate library in C that 
mimicks R3 extensions. Some functionality such as callbacks would 
still be pretty much impossible

Why can't R2 be touched? R2 version 2.7.8 was released 1-Jan-2011. 
Has something changed?

What you would be developing is already in R3, so It's a lot simpler 
to just interface R2 and R3. Probably the most straightforward option 
for that is 0MQ

I mean touching as in changing anything in R2, such as including 
an extensions interface

Why is that not an option? Maybe not very likely, but if enough ask 
for it, maybe then?

Good luck getting Carl to respond to anything REBOL related

Ah yes, that's a good point.

If you're approaching it from a theoretical standpoint, then yes, 
this whole situation could have been avoided by doing things such 
as implementing the new extensions interface in R2 first

R2 is in the backwards-compatibility phase of its existence. No new 
changes are being made to it that would break a lot of R2 code.

That being said, something like this might be possible to add on 
to R2 as a library, though I haven't given much thought as to how.

To integrate the extension interface into R2 would be a huge task, 
and I'm not quite sure how to get around the lack of extendable objects 
(to build the module system on, since extensions are integrated with 
the module system). Adding the handle! type would be easy; adding 
the command! type would be a bit harder.

It would be rather difficult to fake the command! type if you are 
doing the library method, but you could use a similar method to that 
used to fake the closure! type. I am not sure how much you could 
replicate the value marshalling, and callbacks would likely be impossible.

Have you looked into what would be necessary to make a host DLL wrapper 
for R3 that could be loadable with LOAD/library? Is it possible to 
make a host with LOAD/library directly?

These are the sorts of workarounds that created the software bloat 
of the world

To be more concrete: I mean a lib interface that uses the INIT, CALL, 
QUIT structure on the C side. Uses the access to parameters via frames 
and same return concept. And callbacks like done in R3.

As said, callbacks are most likely to be impossible

Which would diminsh the usefullness of such a project