AltME groups: search

Actually, that's another issue:  Do we make a separate fork for R3, 
(considering it may not stabilise for some time.) ?

Hmm.. So you think there is lots of work that can still be done before 
the need to fork becomes a strong issue.

Pick the low-hanging fruit. There's a lot left here

Ok, so we can pool our resources and leave the arguments til a later 
stage.

You can't expect a deep thing like a language platform to catch on 
within a few months, or even a few years. Especially not without 
any advertising

hmm, what a pity ... if all agree, that having OS Rebol is a good 
thing, even for RT, then I wonder why noone want to release? What 
is the point in having Rebol clone sitting on own hd, unreleased?

Pekr, another reason is shyness and desire of learning only. So they 
avoid any legal problems. However I don't see how a clone can have 
legal implications. It is not like we are copying the src code, and 
re-engineering is allowed.

Seeing that the Orca Campfire chat is now closed, some people here 
would like an Orca world and I'm running a number of AltME worlds 
anyway, I started one. If you would like an account, ask me here, 
or log in as guest. The world name is Orca and the guest password 
is guest

We should seriously think about a name change. There is confusion 
with other Orcas. (Everybody seems to like this name.) Eg.
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/

oREBOL (aka OpenRebol) is a good one ...

People have mentioned that we're the guest of RT here. Although Carl 
is fairly OK with clone development now, we're still a competitor, 
so a separate world may be the polite thing to do. At least I'm not 
sure it would be appreciated to make this group web public

Yes, short form when we need it, kind of a standard shortened name 
convention.

kaj: I would foresee a problem when/if Orca would become so powerful 
that it can rival/surpass /Command functionality.

We are not a competitor at all.

And that suggests that we are a competitor

yeah :-( but in a way it would be good, because Rebol itself is not 
GPL friendly. OpenRebol would cover GPL friendly areas.

Karl's own design for a language, retaining REBOL syntax but not 
semantics

Kaj, that might be a problem.

LGPL is the easier route. Changing to BSD could extend REBOL's reach, 
however. For example, when integrating an Orca core with a BSD REBOL/Services 
implementation into some other product

The only way would be to maintain an LGPL-free core and a version 
with LGPL-libraries. But that doesn't solve the issues with the BSD 
core and it starts looking a lot like a fork

But I'm making a bit of a push. :)

Jaime said he's still going to hang around with Orca as on a hobby 
basis.

thanks - i think this is a really good idea, should of happened a 
long time ago

Is it a hobby for you, too, or anything else?

I don't support GPL in any way, that is a bitch license. LGPL I don't 
know about. But if RT releases some parts, I hope those are BSD. 
And if Orca can serve for REBOL back, that is a strange situation 
to have ....

It's more of a religion for me, I guess.

Maybe someone else will come along with a BSD rebol clone one day, 
but Rebol and Orca being at opposite ends of an axis is not a bad 
situation. Nicely balanced.

OK, should relax probably. It is just, it seems a bit contraproductive 
to me, which is a pity .... because if RT could use some good things, 
maybe they would decide to open some of theirs ones, as e.g. Console, 
etc., but it is a pity, the way for cooperation is ... nearly impossible 
....

It probably makes it a lot easier to reverse engineer your code. 
That may be an objection of RT

Anyway, it's hardly a revolt, is it ?

I think it's a revolting name :)

Anyone with any experience with Jabber clients ? I just tried using 
Psi to create an account on jabber.org without much luck. (a possible 
problem with certificate and unresolved host error.)

Do you have a gmail-account?

I collected some links for Orca's scattered resources in the Orca 
world and wrote a how-to for compiling it

SWIG bindings are one-to-one bindings, mapping a C library call to 
a function in the high-level language. This disregards the richer 
ways of expression that are possible in the high-level language. 
As we know, REBOL is especially powerful, and I think it would be 
better to write bindings in a more suitable way

This problem can be observed in Python, which usually has one-to-one 
style bindings. A language like Io, for example, has bindings that 
were designed to fit well with its object-oriented design

Yes, I suppose there would be a big difference between compiled and 
interpreted languages

My first thought a few years ago was SWIG as well, but after looking 
into it, I concluded that it was more suitable to some languages 
than others

Karl is continuing with Thune, his other language of his own design. 
His principle is to design languages based on the same REBOL syntax, 
but with different semantics. So, Thune is still a lot like REBOL, 
but not compatible

Did you read my explanation above why a BSD license wouldn't solve 
all issues going forward?

I am continuing with Orca in Syllable, and I will make improvements 
to Orca where I can and need them. A few other people have expressed 
interest in development as well

GPL/LGPL gives a lot libraries, which cant be used with bsd. No bsd 
or no libraries.

I think there is not a legal problem with "OpenRebol", but I would 
prefer the opinion of someone like Kaj or Reichart.

I'm not a lawyer, as they say, but I think it's a problem under trademark 
law. Whether it would be a problem in practice would depend on RT's 
reaction

Chances are that RT is obliged to take action, because you loose 
the right to a name if you don't defend it

Orca has a trac instance

I'll start doing some things on the project site in the future, but 
I've got a lot of other stuff going on, so it will take some time 
until I get to it

Diffs. I mean load the current base from the repository and generata 
a universal patch using the diff cmd on the two copies. Then we can 
check changes one by one.

I'm reading Ubuntu 6.06RC release notes and here's this:

ORCA

Replacing the venerable Gnopernicus is the new Orca, a scriptable 
screenreader for the GNOME desktop. Expect some great things from 
this in the coming months and years. Best of all, it is written in 
Ubuntu's favourite language, Python.

Hm, that's not OUR orca :( BTW, what is its current status?

Lots of things are called Orca. We still need a name change

I'm working with Orca on Syllable. I've identified a number of bugs 
and missing features that I will work on first when I start developing 
Orca itself

There were a few unreleased bug fixes for Orca and QUIT/RETURN was 
implemented recently, so I made a new release and put it on FreshMeat:

As Orca is backtracking Rebol why not backtrack the name : lober 
a lob in tennis is to get the ball over the other player : ).  It 
is free on Freshmeat.

There's a binary for Linux, and this new version is also included 
in Syllable, starting with Syllable Server 0.2 that I just released

I once did a few simple tests and found ORCA to be generally somewhat 
faster than REBOL 2 in basic processing. Both of them were at least 
twice as fast as Ruby

I found the Computer Language Benchmark Game a few weeks ago. Could 
be interesting to make REBOL and ORCA versions of those benchmarks.

Many years ago that I looked at it, but wasn't REBOL in there with 
a few tests?

I don't see REBOL in there. I've only known about that benchmark 
a few weeks, so REBOL could have been there earlier and later removed 
from some reason.

I think not, not for a long time ...

There was a message on the ORCA mailing list yesterday bu Karl Robillard 
annoucing a new incarnation called Boron.


The Boron wiki page is at 
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/urlan/wiki/BoronProject

Boron looks like a complete ORCA reimplementation, so I changed the 
name of this group to reflect that

It has a shared library instead of a static one, and PThreads integration

interesting thing this Boron .. what are the main coceptual differences 
to rebol? Does it have a QT binding (it looked so)?

There's a new word reference that shows status and compatibility:

because its a specific version of  'terminate

And a few that've been truncated. Doesn't seem like a good road to 
go down.

their argument will be that its rebol that is evil, cause its partially 
closed.   but right now I don't really care.. there are a lot of 
nice things comming for R3.

A little, but you get to load the entire environment over and over 
again for each, possibly short-lived, REBOL process you start

I was just hoping that Boron would choose a permissive license instead 
of a divisive one.

I was just trying to figure out a way to endorse Boron and say that 
it is good for the REBOL community. Sorry.

A large portion of the code in R3 will be in the host code, so having 
a dynamic linking break there won't give you as much benefit as simply 
marking pages as sharable or something.

No, I have always planned on the basis of a shared library, which 
is standard practice and was promised

I will have been made to wait for half a decade for nothing

We'll see. I didn't know that Syllable was open-source only - I was 
keeping it in mind as a platform to be supported. By hybrid-source 
builds, but still a planned target platform. I'm sure having Boron 
as a R3 kernel replacement would be possible, as long as it is license 
compatible.

Kaj, do you realize that the entire host and kernel combination could 
be a shared library? That would solve your startup problems without 
the performance hit. Or you could split your host into platform-abstraction 
and platform-integration portions and then dynamically link between 
those parts. It's just putting the split between the host code and 
the kernel that doesn't make sense.

Yes, applications. By considering closed system components I am treading 
a very fine line. We can never make the base system dependent on 
closed components, for the very reasons we are discussing now

I say that there will be no dynamic split between the host and kernel, 
for practical reasons (performance drops like a stone). I don't say 
that you can't make a statically linked host and kernel into a dynamic 
library that other things can link to.

kaj, the main reason for the close source is to prevent as much of 
linux-like split as possible to the *Language*.

the platform is a totally independent aspect of REBOL.

It' s up to Carl to choose a license that will either unify or divide 
efforts

In Syllable, we are building a unified system out of open source 
components

afaik, Carl wishes the core to be linked in any situation.  There 
are still a few things I'd like in the core to migrate to host, but 
as I know Carl, factual experimentation has more weight than theoretical 
ideas.

Kaj, there are certain licenses that can't be chosen because of things 
like this. *GPL is one of these. Parts of R3 will be closed source, 
so licenses that reject that won't be compatible. If you have a problem 
with that, ask Karl to relicense Boron as Classpath.

so once we have the host and Carl realized that he'd waste less time 
giving us a bit more control, there is a chance for a bit more core->host 
migration still.

Maxim, yes, it would be a great surprise to me if Carl would put 
a bomb under the linking abilities

he just want to protect the language so that we don't end up with 
things like a version of REBOL with commas everywhere... ;-)

I thought that' s called a dialect? :-)

hehe... a dialect still has to obey the syntax rules... commas are 
specifically designed *out* of the language.

but that is not a dialect.  its not valid rebol.

But that' s a different subject, that touches on my CMS

anyhow.... Boron is interesting, I hope there will be a way to bridge 
it and R3 at some point.

Nice!

Boron

)> t: now loop 10000000 [a: div mul sub add 11 2 3 4 5] print ["time:" 
sub now t]
time: 0:00:04.797

R2

>> t: now/precise loop 10000000 [a: divide multiply subtract add 
11 2 3 4 5] print ["time:" difference  now/precise t]
time: 0:00:07.594

R3

>> t: now/precise loop 10000000 [a: divide multiply subtract add 
11 2 3 4 5] print ["time:" difference  now/precise t]
time: 0:00:07.563

Well, that is just one example. But guys - unless anyone shows me 
a complete working clone, not just some subset, it has to be regarded 
being a crap :-)

Such projects might be a good testbed for some new or different ideas, 
but I am carefull in becoming too excited about them. What is the 
purpose of "clone", e.g. Orca, which has something like 50% of natives 
available only? Other thing is the project potential - dunno why 
- maybe because we trusted in RT, or because our community was too 
small, there was not much of a progress with any clone we ever heard 
about. Unless that changes, I want finished R3, because that is right 
now the shortest path to having "new powerfull REBOL" ....

Kaj, do you have a Windows binary of Orca available?

There was also a REBOL clone on .NET that some french group started, 
don't remember the name.

Just wondering what you can do with a clone that has no ports ... 
can it read and write files?  Do cgi ?

I guess it's Karl?  Is there a way to contact him?

Yes, it's Karl, and he has a mail address and mailing list at SourceForge

There has been a continuous line of development over about half a 
decade from ORCA via Thune (and Rune) to Boron. Boron is the newest 
and the only current project

Not much is needed for CGI, so I'd guess it's possible. ORCA had 
a getenv function to get the environment variables and so does Boron, 
I guess