World: r4wp

I've found a bug in Red on ARM: the polymorphic dispatching isn't 
working.

Don't think I've hit that yet

RPi slowness: I've noticed it too...Even overclocked, at 900MHz, 
the UI still feel sluggish...Amiga 500 was having a fast UI running 
at 7MHz, so no excuse for those bloated UI stacks...

Yes, it's really, really frustrating now that Syllable doesn't run 
on ARM

I really can't understand how the UI stacks nowadays can dare produce 
slow results, with CPU and GPU thousand times more performant than 
the poor A500.

That's exactly why :-)

There's something deeply wrong in the way most so-called "modern" 
OS/desktops are designed. My 133MHz Bebox with a poor PCI video card 
was able to provide a very responsive UI, even under heavy load.


The RPi feels like dying as soon as you launch the lightweight (no 
kidding!) web browser Midori...Of course, the browsing is very slow...I'm 
quite disappointed by that and it's not the hardware fault, the RPi 
is a great platform, but the software stack sucks a lot.

Yes, I can't wait to wipe them all out

What we'll probably get first on Raspberry is RISC OS. I was using 
that in 1987, so looking forward to use it again with Red

At least in the official Raspbian you already have NetSurf, a completely 
custom browser ported from RISC OS

Inlined printing fix confirmed working on ARM with Fibonacci and 
SQLite

I would be interested to know, how would QNX perform on RPi - QNX 
is pure C, no C--, highly modular, async, etc.

Linux is pure C, too

Well, but Linux suxx anyway, so :-)

Well, it's also highly modular, async, etc. :-)

The thing is that they made software so complex, that it has become 
extremely hard to point your finger at where exactly it goes wrong. 
We had to build Syllable to get an idea of some of those things, 
and then nobody wants to believe you

Fixed missing function! pointer dereferencing in ARM backend, all 
my Red tests are now running fine on Linux-ARM backend.

Doc, quick license question: Was the BSL chosen because it allows 
you to distribute a binary without requiring that you distribute 
the license, unlike MIT and almost all other open source licenses? 
Would it be a problem if you incorporated Apache licensed code, which 
doesn't distinguish between source or binaries in this? You probably 
wouldn't have to actually include the license with the product, only 
in a web site or help file somewhere...

almost all other open source licenses

 meaning pretty much everything except the WTFPL or public domain.

The problem is that everyone compiling a Red program would have to 
include the licence with it when distributing

Not with it, they just have to provide it somewhere the recipient 
can get it. The NOTICE thing in the Apache license is weird though.

Yes, with it, or in it

No, just "given". And the requirement to provide copyright and license 
notices only applies to source distribution.

That's not what you said on the blog. Can you quote that from the 
Apache licence?

I clarified later. I would have posted the license link except for 
the sman filter. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

It doesn't say that the license must be included with the work, it 
just says that "You must give any other recipients of the Work or 
Derivative Works a copy of this License", it doesn't say how.

There are App Store apps that include a reference to the license 
in their store descriptions, without including them in their apps. 
It can be done.

Sure, but if you don't include the licence and don't code into the 
program where to get it, you're not "giving" it at all

If I put a link on my web site then I'm giving it. I don't have to 
include it, just give it. With BSD and MIT licenses you have to include 
it though.

When you distribute your REBOL program now, you just dump the script 
somewhere, on a web site or in an email or in AltME. To match that 
with Red, you don't want to have to give a licence at all

The length ot the text that you have to manage is immaterial. It 
doesn't matter if you have to manage a few lines of notice or a page 
of the full licence; you just don't want to have to think about it 
for every little progam

The Apache licence was written for a complete web server, the GPL 
is used for complete kernels

It's comparable with the runtime code that GCC compiles into a program 
binary

That has a special linking exception, actually.

Exactly, for the runtime code. Like Red has the BSL

Is there something like the BSL that has Apache's patent grants? 
Because (given that I'm in the US) patents are a bigger issue for 
me.

I'll ask on the blog.

Yes, that would be good. I imagine it would be easy to add an exception 
to the Apache licence

There is no such thing as "not having to provide a license". If a 
license is not provided, then the code cannot be (legally) used.

BrianH asked: "Was the BSL chosen because it allows you to distribute 
a binary without requiring that you distribute the license, unlike 
MIT and almost all other open source licenses?"


With the sole 3-clause BSD, users would need to provide a copy of 
the license with each compiled program, because of the runtime code 
included. So to avoid that, we chose to publish the runtime parts 
of Red and Red/System, under the more permissive BSL terms. The binaries 
that include the compilers (currently that would mean encapped version 
of Red and Red/System compilers) are still under BSD.


When Red will be self-hosted, it will include a JIT-compiler that 
will need to be released under also BSL or similar terms.

Gabriele, it's not about the code not having a licence, it's about 
not having to provide it. If the licence doesn't require physically 
including it, it's implied

Then there's also the class of unlicensed code. It used to be that 
things were sold, not licensed. Software wanted to put that on its 
head, but other things are still simply sold, and so can software

Then there's software that doesn't even need to be bought. SQLite 
is released as public domain, so it doesn't need a licence nor a 
purchase, excepting countries that outlawed the concept of public 
domain

In the future, we will have public domain software because the copyright 
term has run out

Or rather, our grandchildren might, barring further extensions of 
the copyright terms. I suppose that Ada Lovelace's work and maybe 
Jaquard loom programs have fallen into the public domain, but the 
rest of the public domain code was released to the public domain 
explicitly. Almost the entire history of computing is more recent 
than Steamboat Willy.

Doc, would you consider it sufficient to have a license that doesn't 
require that the license be included with (like MIT code) or distributed 
with (like BSD code) the product? The Apache license only requires 
that the license be given to the recipient - it hoesn't specify how 
- and it doesn't even require a copyright reference be included unless 
the product is distributed in source form. I'm just trying to determine 
the extent that you'll be able to include Apache-licensed code in 
Red, or how much this factor matters to you.

The BSL was specifically chosen so that anyone just reading the license 
text will never even have to worry about it.

I'm perfectly fine with the current BSD/BSL licensing model we use 
for Red. I don't see the need for any change there for now.


I'm not sure what you mean precisely with "product". I don't see 
why third-parties redistributing the current Red compilers would 
have problem distributing a copy of the BSD license with them. For 
end-user binaries, users have no obligations to give a copyright 
reference or distribute a copy of the license.


If you are wondering about including possible future R3 code parts 
under APL-2 in Red codebase, I see no problem with that so far (as 
long as they are separate files or modules, we don't want to start 
having several licenses per file).

Brian, where do you get that the Apache licence doesn't require a 
copyright reference be included unless the product is distributed 
in source form?

Also, Apache is incompatible with GPL 2. Mixing Apache into the Red 
runtime would make it illegal to use GPL 2 libraries