World: r4wp

made good progress over the holiday, powered by turkey sandwiches 
from France.


Prep of C source nearly done. See, not just a dump and run. Sure, 
a few problems came up, but I'm not going to hold up the release 
for them. You can decide.


Grabbed latest git source and built it for this dev box (which did 
not support 1.8 version as bin.)


Once released, I've got a number of notes to write up. Like how to 
quickly port R3. Takes about 5 mins if you know what you're doing. 
Got it up on ARM & MIPS Linux.


Also, I have some goals in mind. Android and iphone, that kind of 
thing. Getting graphics and sound back up. GUI and tinyGUI. A micro-R3 
for smallish embedded systems.

There's a lot you can help with. Delegation, right?

Cool.    See the source...

Created a new project at http://github.com/SteeveGit/R3-CODE-EDITOR

For now, only the vertical scrolling is worth testing (still random 
crashes).
For windows users with the saphirion's R3 version found at
http://www.saphirion.com/development/downloads-2/
(pick the first .zip)

Today I updated my Red compiler script on rebol.org. The script now 
can now also compile Red scripts, not just Red/System scripts.

You can find the new script here http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=redcompiler.r

Gregg Irwin has rewritten the redcompiler.r script on rebol.org and 
I now added a help screen, a check for a red.r compilerscript in 
the selected directory, support for Red source only compilation, 
the option --red-only Doc recently added. 

You can still find the new script here http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=redcompiler.r

I've updated the Red(/System) test binaries. Instructions are in 
my recent Syllable article:

http://web.syllable.org/news/2012-11-18-20-47-Red-high-level-programming-language-first-alpha.html

If you want to help ensure the quality of the upcoming Red 0.3.1 
release, please test the example programs

A kind reminder to subscribe to the Red mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/red-lang
is you haven't done so already.

Here's a 6502 CPU emulator written in Red/System:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-6502

It was enabled by the function pointer casting in Red 0.3.0 and the 
new functionality of the preprocessor. It proves that such a low 
level and performance critical thing can be done with Red

I haven't tested it much yet, because I haven't emulated a machine 
around it yet

However, I rewrote it from a fairly complete Atari XL/XE emulator 
that I did in C a long time ago. The new code is a third shorter, 
mostly due to abundant use of preprocessor macros, which are less 
horrible in Red/System than in C

In this new emulator, I abstracted the machine emulation from the 
CPU emulator, so that different machines could be implemented using 
the same CPU emulator

My full Atari emulator ran full speed on a Pentium 75 or a 100 MHz 
486. I roughly expect this one to run half as fast, so as a full 
emulator I'd expect it to need a Pentium 150. As another guesstimate, 
it should need half a Raspberry Pi

Carl released the R3 source today: https://github.com/rebol/r3

The G+ Rebol community is born: https://plus.google.com/communities/100845931109002755204

Let me announce first achievement of bringing R3 to Android OS based 
devices. I know many of you were waiting for this so long so here 
is the first test version to download:

http://development.saphirion.com/experimental/R3droid.apk


Note this is just first raw port showing the interpreter is working. 
The console input is missing at the moment, but will be probably 
among first things to add so you can have your beloved /Core on your 
mobile/tablet.


If you would like to speed up this developement, donate, sponsor 
or make a bounty for features please crosscheck with Robert/Saphition(he'll 
write more info here as well)

(feel free to post your feedback with testing  in Android group)

To start off, I'm offering a matching donation up to $500, to Saphirion, 
for this work.  (Moving to Android group...)

I tested R3droid.apk on a Huawei M865C, and it works :)

Made it to restore the web-project for http://development.saphirion.com


That's where we are going to publish our R3 stuff. Still some work 
to do, but you will find our R3 version there, R3-GUI etc.

http://development.saphirion.com


I have reworked the whole site. You can download the latest R3 releases 
with graphics engine for windows for now. Further our latest R3-GUI 
release is available too.


The site contains a bounty shop as well, if you want to support / 
donate to some of our efforts. All things we will work on are listed.

Stay tuned, more to come over the next weeks.

Added our source-code archive to the downloads.

Updated our R3 version. Changes:


- no longer links libstdc++ dynamically but statically. You get an 
error that libstdc++-6.dll is missing from your computer.

- changed startup procedure to support correct stdio redirection 
in console mode (used if you start R3 with a command line argument, 
else GUI mode)

I've got a question about using MakeDoc/MakeDoc Pro vs Markdown/MultiMarkdown. 
Are there significant advantages with MakeDoc that outweigh going 
with Markdown which seems to be the defacto standard for lightweight 
markup? I guess when MakeDoc first came out it was pretty unique, 
but if you were to need this kind of tool today wouldn't it make 
sense to use something with wider adoption?

wrong group...

My 6502 emulator in Red/System now takes the name of a ROM file as 
a command line parameter. It can load any ROM that's a multiple of 
2 KB in size:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-6502

I also extended the tracing. At the start of each instruction, all 
CPU registers are now dumped

I've tried several operating system ROMs. They seem to work, although 
it's still hard to judge without a real machine emulated around the 
CPU

I've added binaries for all systems to my test repository, so you 
can now easily try the emulator if you have some ROM from the golden 
days:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-test

I've added a Fibonacci example to my benchmarks in Red with the main 
function written as a routine!:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-C-library/dir?ci=tip&name=examples/Fibonacci

It's 45 times faster than the pure Red version, and all you have 
to do is replace the word FUNCTION with the word ROUTINE :-)

I think this is going to be hard to explain to people :-)

I've also added it to the test builds. Convenient instructions are 
in this article:

http://web.syllable.org/news/2012-11-18-20-47-Red-high-level-programming-language-first-alpha.html

Yes, kind of hard to explain, as the single word change makes it 
45 times faster :-) It is just that R/S is syntactically similar 
to Red, so it might look confusing, why we don't use routine simply 
each time :-)

I've added Doc's new Red interpreter REPL console to the Red test 
builds:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-test

So you can now try it immediately. Currently only for Windows, so 
it's in MSDOS\Red\console.exe

I feel small and humble in the shadow of Doc's Xmas present, but 
for what it's worth, here's a very preliminary Red binding with SQLite:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-SQLite

Series and structs aren't marshaled yet; they're just passed as address 
integers

Only simple functions work so far. I've added a Red version of do-sql 
to the test programs that just prints the SQLite version. See above. 
They're in */Red/do-sql

As you can see there are a number of primitive constructs in the 
Red binding. I'll report issues as I go

Great work, Kaj!