World: r4wp

Does it do platform abstraction for those low level features, or 
are they platform dependent?

It does abstract everything that can be abstracted, currently, IIRC, 
only FPU options (system/fpu/* properties) are platform-specific.

One thing I'm torn on when it comes to VMs is if I need to write 
my own at all. I know I will have to write a Bootstrapping language 
as an intermediary, but I'm thinking it might be a waste of time 
when LLVM has such aggressive optimization for compilation and also 
supports JIT - both of which I'd have to write myself otherwise.

LLVM is a good choice if you really want a VM (Red/System is more 
a standalone language than a VM).

Of course.

Yes Jerry wants that.

for making Chinese Alias

Doc, aliases are used in R3 internally to implement case-insensitive 
words. Explicit use of the ALIAS function is rare and unsafe though, 
so it's been recommended that the function be removed.

How much of an overhead is there from using this mechanism over alias:

  my-alias-of-print: :print

No overhead, but it's not equivalent to an alias.

Brian: I think that was the case for R2 too? I used the same trick 
in r-sharp, so ALIAS was coming almost for free.

Isn't Red/System more the runtime environtment for Red? Like for 
Smalltalk or Oberon systems?

No, I don't think so. The Red runtime is written in Red/System. Red/System 
compiles to machine code.

I suspect that the Red runtime will be linked into Red executables 
rather than exist as a separate file.

Doc, aliases weren't used that way in R2. R2 stores the word strings 
using the case that the word was first loaded in. When you load subsequent 
words of the same name, they display with the case that the first 
one had. In R3 words are case-preserving, displaying with the case 
they had when they were loaded, even if other words with the same 
name have different cases. I prefer the R3 method, it's a good system, 
though it does lead to some confusion from people used to R2. For 
instance, they compare like strings:
>> 'a = 'A
== true
>> 'a == 'A
== false
>> 'a =? 'A
== false

Peter: exactly.

Brian, that was REBOL 1. REBOL 2 is case preserving.

>> [a A ab Ab aB AB]
== [a A ab Ab aB AB]

Well, IMO than it's not really so clearly stated. Taking a look at 
chart 10, confuses me.  Maybe it's the wording. Doc, I would simplify 
all this to more commone terms to make it as simple as possible for 
new users.

So, Red Compiler is like the first C++ compilers that emitted C code, 
but emits Red System language?

A reduced dialect?

Yes, except that Red/System is designed to fit Red, and Red will 
pass code to Red/System efficiently in loaded block form, instead 
of text form that the C compilers had to parse again

Robert, Nenad's intial plan was for the Red compiler to directly 
generate machine code. So his first presentation reflects that. It 
was a few months after the launch that he decided to generate Red/System 
code from the Red compiler.

Ok, IMO it just needs to be made more clear. I'm confusig it after 
not tracking this here for a time. Just make things as simple as 
possible.

Robert: C++ is a superset of C. Red is not a superset of Red/System, 
they are two different languages that share the same syntax and superficially, 
some semantic rules. Red/System is a low-level dialect of Red than 
enables system & hardware programming with C-level performances. 
Additionally, Red/System is used to build Red runtime (memory manager, 
lexer, natives,...).

Merged namespaces branch with master branch.

Kaj: I'll give tonight a quick try to add namespaces support to aliases, 
then I'll make the 0.2.6 release.

Cool :-)

Kaj: aliases are now namespace-aware! ;-)

But I'm not 100% confident that my changes cover all possible use-cases, 
so I'll delay the 0.2.6 release until tomorrow night to give us time 
to test it better.

In the meantime, I'll also have a look at the compilation target 
folder issue you've raised.

By the way, it's also about compilation source. If your source is 
in your working directory, you still have to provide the full path

Kaj, for compilation or for including?

I think rsc.r should work fine with relative paths.

Compiling; relative paths do work for including

The GTK binding doesn't work anymore

Compiling with rsc.r works fine with relative paths; where do you 
encounter problems?

It doesn't work for me, on Linux

Or for me on OS X :

Schulz:Red peter$ rebol -qs red-system/rsc.r red-system/tests/hello.reds

Cannot access source file: red-system/tests/hello.reds

If you login to red-system dir compiling tests/hello.reds will work.

I presume Kaj's issue is having to cd to the red-system dir before 
compiling (it is a bit of a pain).

The GTK binding doesn't work anymore
 Was it working before my changes on aliases?

Yes, I reported it in the tracker

Peter, I had automated switching directories in a wrapper script, 
but I don't seem to have to do that anymore in the current version

I can start rsc.r from any directory, but then it fails to find the 
source file in that directory

Kaj: the issue has been fixed.

For some odd reason, it does indeed work if I switch manually to 
the directory holding rsc.r

Thanks!

Kaj: I've tried compiling from different folders (out of Red/ tree), 
with both absolute and relative paths to %rsc.r, the compilation 
goes well. The only issue I see is that the final binary is in Red's 
%builds/ instead of local folder. I guess I should change that to, 
by default, output the binary to same folder as program source code.

Why not simply the working directory? That's the common way compilers 
work

That also means you don't want to change into the Red tree to start 
the compiler