World: r3wp

I found out, that Genesi is now sponsoring Linaro Linux, which tries 
to unify distros for ARM target. They gave away 50 smartbooks:

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2010/12/momentum-is-building.html
http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook


From past month's discussion with BBRV, I believe they are able to 
send us a machine to port R3. And now again - this is not my port-it-for-me 
request, just a note, to eventually start a discussion, how do we 
get ourselves on ARMs. Carl could have one smartbook to port Core, 
and someone willing to play with the HostKit port could have another 
one. In the case someone is interested, I could try to negotiate 
it with BBRV.


Of course - ARM is a broad term. I never heard of Linaro. We have 
some TI hardware, and I know there are some embedded systems for 
such stuff, mostly commercial and expensive, and Linaro might be 
an answer here. Another HW option is BeagleBoard (cheaper, more OSes 
supported, even QNX, Android):

http://beagleboard.org/

Pekr- thanks for the help, sorry my internet was so slow I didn't 
notice all the other chats until it was loaded just now. Thanks again 
for the quick response!

Porting R3 to an ARM netbook Linux would be a good start. The binary 
R3 library may then even work on Android

However, the Android cross-compiling SDK with its emulator is also 
a good development environment

Agreed.

Porting to a mainstream Linux ARM will hardly be any work at all.

Mostly a matter of either setting up a system to do the compile, 
or setting up a cross-compilation toolchain.

There will be some source changes, but probably not many

Talking about the hostkit side.

I imagine that some areas in the library, such as floating point 
support, may encounter some minor difficulties.

Me too. ARM is not a PC architecture, so there may be differences 
in the device drivers

Is there any plan to implement the serial port? I wanted to communicate 
with GSM modem via serial port for sending AT-commands. Thx.

Haven't heard anything about it, but I'm sure eventually someone 
will be interested in it

For such things it would probably be best to wait for the implementation 
of the devices interface, though

I was just recently thinking about serial port too, we will need 
it for kiosks. Maybe Carl could release R2 serial interface sources 
as a starter?

Let's say that I have a C++ application and would like to use R3.dll 
in it. Is there someone who is able to create a minimal example which 
would init R3.dll, send a string to it and get, for example, reversed 
output? I'm sure that such and example would help with R3 adoption.

I'll get to that when I start porting View to the Syllable GUI, but 
that project is still a bit in the future

Starting with literally just the dll is probably a unnecessarily 
complicated way to approach this.

The easier approach is to reshape the hostkit to embed it in another 
application.

The current "main" (src/os/host-main.c) is a good demonstration of 
what is necessary to init libr3 and eval strings.

Yes, of course

Any idea why we do not receive key up events? It should be supported 
according the source code.

Not directly related to R3, but an example how MorphOS guys aproach 
using LUA as a system language extension (AREXX replacement). It 
might be interesting to compare for those, who plan to integrate 
R3 to other systems - http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=32945&forum=28

When I build R3A110 and use text in view, the text is invalid. It's 
valid only if I provide it as UCS2, like:  g_text: make gob! [size: 
100x20 text: "^(41)^(00)^(42)^(00)"]

Does anybody (except Cyphre, who is not here) know, what can be wrong? 
I build it with CodeBlocks.

The problem is related to the graphics part only as I can use text, 
even with czech chars, correctly in the console.

I wonder how much differ the RM-assets' host-kit from the latest 
Carl's one.

Has Unicode support been added to R3 Graphics yet?

It is in the Rm's binary release.

That's great news.

If RM want more people to join the GUI development, they should sync 
the host-kit with Carl.

Our release is more advanced as the official one from Carl. As our 
changes are merged into the offical version from time to time. We 
move forward with our branch.

advanced WRT to the graphics & GUI stuff.

Isn't it possible to provide your version as well?

It's available from www.rm-asset.com

I mean the source of course.

fine... I've found that the text must be bound to the text extension 
context.. this works:
ext-text: import 'text
g_text: make gob! [size: 100x20 ]
g_text/text: bind [
	;bold true
	text "AB"
] ext-text


The question is, what is changed in RM's version that it works without 
such a hack.... I have no problem to hack just the official A110 
version so far as I'm trying to understand how the internals work, 
but I really think that we need synced source repository ASAP.

Is there a way how to force REBCHR to be in multibyte format? Because 
the problem for the above issue is at this line:

https://github.com/rebolsource/r3-hostkit/blob/f331c6a46947e6e5afedc90f3d375bcd3f7ad8a1/src/agg/agg_truetype_text.cpp#L305

You can define it when you create a REBSER string, but a character, 
I don't know

Doesn't REBCHR refer to an internal format?

Yeah, I don't think I've seen it anywhere

The extensions use u32 for a character

Yes... but AGG requires multibyte. Probably. At least I can display 
gob with non ansi string like:
	g_text: make gob! [size: 100x20 text: "èøž"]
but not:
	g_text: make gob! [size: 100x20 text: "crz"]

If text is needed in a different format, you have to convert it somehow

Multibyte will always need to be multibyte. The question is what 
sort of multibyte

AB
 = "^(41)^(00)^(42)^(00)"

As Kaj says, that just means that there needs to be a conversion 
step in there somewhere. R3's internal character format is supposed 
to switch amond UCS-1, UCS-2 and UCS-4 in theory, but in practice 
might just be UCS-2 all the time (haven't checked lately).

There must be easy way... for example to check the RMA's source :)

Sounds like it's configured for Windows UCS-2

I'd be surprised if AGG couldn't work with UTF-8, and that wouldn't 
be the default on Unix

I can only test on Windows at the moment, so I don't know how it 
behaves on other platforms.