World: r3wp

I didn't need a CASE-like statement so far in Red/System, so it's 
there yet. Current implemented control flow statements: IF, EITHER, 
UNTIL, WHILE, ANY, ALL. So implementing CASE should be doable.

it's there
 => it's not there

Look at the source of LOAD and sys/load-header for some good examples 
of the CASE/all style. It's worth supporting.

I'm sure it would be nice to have it, but my short term goal with 
Red/System is to just code the minimal set of primitives required 
to build the upper layer (Red's runtime layer). I was hoping that 
other developers could keep expanding/improving Red/System while 
I would progress on the Red part.

Good point.

What makes CASE/all different from a long sequence of IFs?

(In respect to Red/System, where those will be equal, performance-wise.)

Maintainability of code. We found that the CASE/all style makes changes 
to code easy to make, and control flow easy to understand. This realization 
came out of the process of rewriting R3's module system into easier-to-maintain 
code.

It's sleep time here, but I can't resist to post a first Red/System 
source example:

#import [
	"kernel32.dll" [
		GetStdHandle: "GetStdHandle" [
		  	type		[integer!]
		  	return:		[integer!]
		]
		WriteConsole: "WriteConsoleA" [
		  	handle		[integer!]
		  	buffer		[string!]
		  	len		[integer!]
		  	written		[struct! [value [integer!]]]
		  	reserved	[integer!]
		  	return:		[integer!]
		]
	]
]

stdout: GetStdHandle -11
written: struct [value [integer!]]

prin: func [s [string!] return: [integer!]][
	WriteConsole stdout s length? s written 0
]

prin "Hello Red World!"

Ladislav, regarding Red being a REBOL dialect if Red's syntax is 
a subset of the data exchange dialect syntax: I fully agree.

Of course, this will be part of Red/System own small runtime, exposing 
among other functions, PRIN and PRINT.

How are the types of local variables declared in Red/System? The 
slideshow says no type inference...

As in REBOL: using /LOCAL followed by name and datatype.

And /local is special, not just another refinement?

Yes, it's a reserved keyword. I planned to add refinement support 
also, but I'm not sure I will need it to implement Red runtime, so 
it will be probably postponed.

how many attended the conference?

We were 5, but it felt like 10 ;-)

heh, well having actually had a conf i think you can use a 3x multiplier

Brian: here's an example of /LOCAL usage from my Red/System tests 
scripts (just a variation on the real PRINT function):


print: func [s [string!] return: [integer!] /local lf [string!] sz 
[integer!]][
	lf: "^/"
	prin s
	sz: 1
	WriteConsole stdout lf sz written 0
]

No tmp variables then :)

Nope.

Cool examples, Doc

The real PRINT is defined as: 

print: func [s [string!]][
	prin s
	prin "^/"
]

Only string!, no binary!?

I'm wondering about the Unicode strategy...

In Red/System, I mean. Of course Red will have both.

Binary! is half-supported. It was part of my initial list of type 
to support, but as I didn't needed it so far, it's not supported. 
That might change when I'll implement the lexical analyzer.

Have you decided yet whether the lexical analyzer will have the same 
source-is-UTF8-binary strategy as R3?

I plan to support UTF-8 scripts for both Red & Red/System. The memory 
storage model is not yet decided, could be UTF-8 or UCS-2.

And arguments and locals can only have one type in their typespecs 
for Red/System?

In fact, they can have several types as long as they take the same 
space in memory, but support for that has not yet been implemented.

Do you currently compile the above directly to binary machine code?

Yes, machine code, then generating an executable.

ABI differences will probably give you the heebie-jeebies :)

The whole compiler is 40KB, the linker is 20KB.

I did the PE/COFF support, no other ABI can be so screwed up. :-)

Obviously, GCC is superior at 50 MB or so

That is only the binary format :)

I assume you currently do x86 stdcall only?

Yes, but the support for cdecl is like adding a couple of lines to 
the current code.

Sure. But that quickly gets extremely annoying :)

Red/System uses stdcall for its own functions, I found out that it 
was generating shorter code than cdecl.

That's why stdcall was invented :)

Or on x86, fastcall, rather :)

The really annoying part was having to reverse the arguments list 
to support stdcall. It's a much more difficult when you're compiling 
in one pass directly to machine code.

Fastcall, sure, that would be the target in a future version with 
an optimizing compiler.

Do string references in Red/System have indexes, or are they just 
pointers?

They support indexed read/write accesses like in C, but using a REBOL 
syntax, so s/1, s/2, s/3...

I meant offset references an internal pointer to the head and an 
offset index, like s: next s.

Indexing with a variable should also be possible: 
s: "hello"
c: 1

s/c or s/:c (haven't decided yet which one is the more appropriate)