World: r3wp

ah well.

does syllable only run on x86?  or could it be retargetted on efika 
boards, for example?

Don't worry. I already did that a year and a half ago in Milan :-)

:-)

x86 only now, but it should be easy to port. It's just that porting 
is hard in itself, so all the people who have claimed that they were 
going to do it over the weekend have never been heard from again 
:-)

I can understand the H/W driver part being a nightmare.  timing and 
resource sharing is not trivial.

It's almost all C, with just a few fragments of assembler. The drivers 
are from Linux and X, so if you go back to the original versions, 
they're portable

ok, as long as they are also available for the other HW, I see... 
good practice  :-)

It's just that it's a deeply technical procedure with many steps, 
so few people are capable of it, and everyone would have to learn 
along the way

yes obviously.

The easiest and most useful port would be to AMD64, so when we get 
to it, we will focus on that first

Over the years I've already done work on cross-compiling toolchains

is syllable able to compile itself?

Since time immemorial. That's how we got AtheOS from Kurt, and it 
has been a huge advantage

We don't cross-develop such as almost all other alternative systems. 
We develop on Syllable itself, so we have always been at a relatively 
low bug level

using your own stuff always improves its quality.  the nasty things 
get fixed fast... they annoy you the first  :-)

With the cross-compiling toolchain, we could develop for Linux on 
Syllable :-)

Exactly

does Orca support AGG dialect?

In fact, I use my Syllable build system on Linux to build the ORCA 
and GrUB packages for Linux

No, ORCA is still very basic. It has bindings for BZip2, but nothing 
else yet

We don't have an AGG port yet for Syllable, either, but I hear it 
just compiles. Integration is another story, though

if porting of R3 is possible and works out in the end... would you 
consider dropping ORCA just for the fact that you would have access 
to much more applications from day one?  and since you can adapt 
and extend it from the inside (per the info so far), you could still 
add your own custom native flavor to it...

We would include both. Our strategy for survival is to be open source, 
so we can't make the system dependent on closed parts. But, at least 
in our project, we can put closed stuff on top of it

So we use ORCA in the base system to increase the level of REBOL, 
and we could run REBOL 3 applications on top

You see that it's important to us that ORCA is REBOL compatible, 
so the two layers can communicate

i see

do you have an image of this biuld  to use with VMPlayer yet ?

Yes, from now on we're building the VMWare image ourselves. It's 
among the download files

It can also be used in many other emulators

thanks

Syllable is OK, Petr

In a week we have a small conference, our second, in the Netherlands. 
We will make an important announcement there

We have several things coming up, including a new release

important announcement? Interesting! Are you becoming AmigaOS 5? 
:-)

is there a chance REBOL will remain for scripting? I mean - with 
R3 model, there is now certain possibility to use R3 open source 
parts in syllable, and then, theoretically, cloning rebol itself 
should be an easier task? Is Syllable strictly open source? Or could 
it live with closed source R3 rebol.dll?

Yes :-)

I'll not spoil the conference by specifying what I said yes to :-)

But as I've already said here before, we're already using ORCA for 
some scripting. Because the base system has to stay open source

:-)

I hope Yes went to REBOL. Hands off of Amiga Inc. :-)

:-)

btw - is Syllable any close to AmigaOS? What most users value about 
AmigaOS was - it was very responsive, dynamic, could be scripted 
to hell.....

Yes, it is that, although extensive scripting will come in a later 
phase, as with AmigaOS

.... eh, it does not translate itself as well ... scripted to death, 
till death ... but it does not translate well too probably :-)

drivers are part of kernel space, or user space?

btw - how does Syllable team motivate itself in today's IT world? 
We have some Linux distros, catching to user requirements, e.g. Ubuntu. 
Do you do Syllable mostly for fun, or do you really find some place 
for its existance in today's crowded OS world?

Both. Mostly the BeOS model of having userspace servers for as much 
as possible. But our network stack and drivers are in kernel space, 
for example, which makes it more efficient than BeOS

Carl will be happy to hear that this makes our select() implementation 
more elegant than in BeOS :-)

Syllable is something special. It has tremendous added value over 
systems such as Linux