World: r4wp

Even Cyphre doesn't want to use it anymore, for technical reasons

 - I never heard anything like that, and it even does not correspond 
 with my info, that in fact Cyphre would like to redo the View engine 
 completly ...

I have already provided a GUI for Red. It's fine if R3/View is rewritten 
for it, but I'm not going to do it

Well, Ok, I need to get rich, to pay some dev to port View to RED 
for my purposes :-)

What's your GUI for RED? GTK? How big is that? No under 1MB exe, 
no sugar :-)

I'm porting those toolkits to Syllable now exactly to clarify which 
options I can support

Cyphre redoing the View engine is the same as not wanting to use 
the current one anymore, isn't it?

No, it was just his long term idea, to abstract the engine, so that 
it can use various backends - AGG, Cairo, etc, and provide platform 
acceleration, where available. Unfortunatelly, that was just an idea 
on his side, no real project. There is nothing wrong with View engine 
itself, apart from some bugs in core, which make it look unfinished. 
That would not happen with Red, as all sources and hence debugging 
is possible ...

If you port it to Red, you'll only have a drawing engine, no widgets. 
I already have that in my Enlightenment port to Syllable, or in SDL 
or DirectFB if you combine it with some drawing library

But other engines you name are far from what View engine in fact 
is - system of gobs, etc. Widgets are VID. I still prefer not so 
much perfect VID, instead of overbloated stuff ...

As I've reported before, Enlightenment is quite like View regarding 
the architecture

How big are the Enlightenment libs? Does E have any peculiar build/runtime 
dependencies?

It's a pretty integrated stack, but modularised into more than ten 
packages. The dependencies are pretty much the same as the basic 
dependencies for other toolkits such as GTK, and most of them are 
optional. Stuff such as FreeType and FontConfig:

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=download&l=en

Very roughly speaking, when you add up the libraries, Enlightenment 
is half the size of GTK which is half the size of Qt

The shared libraries on my system currently total 5 MB, without dependencies 
from outside Enlightenment

Thanks.

Cyphre redoing the View engine is the same as not wanting to use 
the current one anymore, isn't it?

 - Well, I actually use the current one with R3 almost everyday ;-) 
  And to make things clear I won't be redoing it...my plan is to update 
 it to 'next generation'  also add more features and improve some 
 parts of the current base etc.

I thought you found AGG too slow on your phone?

Kaj - I do remember View 1.0 alpha with CID (predecessor to VID) 
on a Pentium 75, 130 - ran "acceptable". Cell phones have limited 
UI needs imo, I doubt AGG will be slow. Of course some heavy operations 
might drag some juice from the battery, as it is not accelerated. 
We now need to find the ways of how to get Cyphre's idea becoming 
a reality ...

The issue is with phones that don't have FPUs. I'm just basing myself 
on what Cyphre said several months ago

Kaj, yes, but the changes I plan will allow you to relatively easily 
use different renderer component. Even in current host-kit I would 
just replace the agg renderer with something more suitable for slow 
or not sufficiently equipped  ARM cpus but the "framework base" of 
the sytem would remain same.

Pekr, my experiment showed AGG on ARM without FPU was way slower 
than the native implementation of Android Canvas engine...mainly 
because the Canvas uses integer based rasterizer etc.

well, are there really devices, with no FPU these days?

For example my Smasung Galaxy mini phone :-) AFAIK these low-ends 
are owned by a lot of people who doesn't have big enough pockets 
to handle the much bigger, expensive and powerful ones.

That might be a history sooner, than R3/View exists for such devices 
:-)

Yes, but it is always good to have some flexibility and choose which 
graphics setup is more suitable for your target platform.

Also If you need pixel-precise results in your app you can still 
use the Agg for making hi-quality output etc.

so what's available on Android for e.g.? Skia? Cairo? Or their Canvas 
engine is another different thing?

AFAIK Android uses Skia for the Canvas graphics.

Well, without R3 core being compiled to droid, there's no chance 
to get R3 running there, no? So your tests involved pure AGG test, 
with no relation to REBOL?

Yes, but you can guess how Rebol will be fast on such device. The 
cpu I have has around 600Mhz so just remember when you run Rebol 
10 years ago on your desktop ;)

will it influence REBOL in overall? I mean - even Core speed? Most 
probably yes, when flot calculations are done?

hmm, maybe we should move to another group ...

I guess so :)

OK, so your engine could use the Enlightenment canvas as a rendering 
backend. :-) That's pretty much what we're planning for Red: dialects 
for multiple native backends

Today was Syllable's tenth anniversary. I took the opportunity to 
present the Enlightenment graphics engine that I've been porting 
in the past months

http://www.osnews.com/story/26189/Syllable_gets_Enlightenment_graphics_engine

Happy birthday to Syllable! Great gift Kaj.

Thanks :-)

I ported the Syllable package manager from ORCA to Boron

I was hoping to avoid this and do it in Red, but it is not there 
yet

I needed it now because call/output is broken in ORCA

So now you can program an Enlightenment widget in Boron to be displayed 
in a window on the Syllable desktop? The article is very detailed 
and requires to know a lot of background information.

No, only if you were to program a Boron extension in C that binds 
to Enlightenment

Out of the box, Boron has some bindings with Qt and OpenGL, that 
don't work on Syllable

And as the Enlightenment article says, the widget set hasn't been 
ported to Syllable Desktop yet

I'm now logged in on Syllable Server, with X11 built on top of it

We've done that for two years now, but that was on our in-house Syllable 
Workstation, Syllable Server with GoboLinux transplanted on top of 
it. Now I'm running on pure Syllable Server, with X built from source

That cleans up a lot of problems with the GoboLinux integration, 
so it is becoming production ready

On the other hand, I've just spent the equivalent of a full work 
week just to get the legacy fonts in X that R2/View needs