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Kaj, this may be a dumb question, but as it stands now, can one create 
an android app with Red?

james - there is no Red yet, just Red/System. And yes, you can kind-of 
create Android apps. But - those are bare-bones linux ARM apps, which 
can run on an Android phone. I tried that on my HTC Sensation. Right 
now, there is no app-store support, nor the ability to link to Android 
API, which would require the JAVA bridge. You can find some info 
here - http://www.red-lang.org/2011/12/arm-support-released.html

VIA Technologies competition to Raspberry Pi - http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/22/via-technologies-outs-49-apc-android-barebones/

Recently tried to run the Hello World on my Android based Galaxy 
Samsung Tab 10 but after seeing the "executing ..." msg. Nothing 
appeared. I will try to look at what could be done but I suspect 
I also have to first learn a bit more about Android and my machine 
to help ... I'm very patient and began to read about the ARM. and 
Android itself. What an evolving world we live in ...

@Gerard: received, thank you very much!  What version of Android 
do you have?

@Doc: Android version 3.1 and kernel is 2.6.36.3

@Doc : Thanks for the try of the emulator - Now installing the Android 
update for my - almost 50 % left to do after 30 minutes - for an 
88 MB download - !!!  I will retest after everything is completed...

@Doc : Now I'm upgraded to Android version 3.2 Kernel is left unchanged 
to version 2.6.36.3 - Will try later for the tests - other more urgent 
taks are awaiting  for me now ...

@Doc : No better success even if running from NativeEXE.apk version 
0.5 and Android version 3.2 - will continue to read before being 
able to investigate myself what could be done - Please don't loose 
your time on this case for now - You have much better  to do ... 
even if it's annoying a bit. I don't despair but I really can't be 
useful to you for now... my understanding of the inner working of 
this stuff exceeds my current capabilities !

However, Windows, OS X and Android are missing from the OS entries

But in short - Red is going to be compiled language, and it will 
probably get some kind of JIT too, to allow interactive stuff like 
console. Red language compiles down to Red/System, which is kind 
of VM for it. In fact, it is REBOL-like low level wrapper to C, allowing 
some bindings. Red/System apps recently run even on ARM, eg I am 
able to run it on my HTC Sensation. But that's raw ARM Linux, no 
Android API linking yet ....

dynamic/shared libraries support? Ability to generate a DLL? Is it 
e.g. any prerequisite to come to Android, or just useful generally?

Ability to generate DLL, yes. It is a prerequisite for Android (and 
probably iOS/OSX) support.

But bridging with Android and iOS is high priority, so Blender will 
wait.

some kind of brige is required, if we want to get into an Android 
API. Ditto for .NET?

can I generate e.g. ARM executable/library from Windows Red/System?


You can cross-compile ARM/ELF code from Windows or MacOSX, just use 
the appropriate target (https://github.com/dockimbel/Red). Currently 
there's only two ARM targets: Linux-ARM and Android. You can cross-compile 
to these targets from any platform Red/System compiler works on.

Before the Christmas, we might see extensive Red alpha, along with 
Android support ;-)

OK, and also dispo in android I think and bbrerry os...

The big advantage of SQLite over other similar engines is that it's 
bundled already in the main mobile platforms (Android and iOS).

Are there different Android platforms as well?

AFAIK, Android libs uses softfp convention.

Fixed the math library in the C library binding; should now also 
work on OS X and Android

hmm, I thought, that once compiled = you know what is resolving to 
what, we end up to some 5KB to 100 KB max. Other than that, we are 
really not much different to REBOL/Core, which is really bad, thinking 
of the kind of e.g. Android apps, which will require the "interpreter", 
to be always built in.

Having just each 

hello world" app to take 60KB etc. is a bit too much ...." You're 
not having the right metrics in mind. What matters is not the size 
of a "Hello World" app, but size of a real app. A typical real app, 
like with REBOL + /Encap, will be just a few dozens KB bigger than 
the runtime library. So, most Red apps will be less than 500KB and 
still less than 1MB for really big ones (not counting additional 
resources data). A "Hello World" using Appcelerator (one of the leader 
in Android dev tools market) is around 600KB. Also have a look at 
the size of apps installed on your Android devices, most of them 
are bigger than the typical apps size Red will produce.


If you want to compare with app size that Java can produce, take 
Red/System in order to compare apples to apples. Anyway, Java apps 
are cheated, because the JVM is built in Android. I don't remember 
seeing any way to install a shared library across different apps 
on Android, but maybe there's a way?

As for shared lib, etc, eg Apple strictly prohibits any kind of runtine 
IIRC, so some idea of having REBOL there (an interpreter, runtime), 
which would just run scripts, is not allowed imo. Not sure about 
the Android, but I expect just the same. Well, maybe Red will become 
so popular with Google, that it gets into the distro by default :-)

Well, I don't necessarily like big solutions/libraries. Of course 
it will make sense, if they are already a part of the toolchain, 
e.g. GTK being part of every linux distro, Android, etc. , ditto 
Cairo. So far I could see complaints about AGG not being accelerated, 
and what irritates me about such claims is - we never ever utilised 
full advantage of AGG, yet we complain. And then we are going to 
use crap like Cairo, just becau HW is going to help us. I would rather 
use smaller AGG instead of several times bigger Cairo lib, and orientiate 
myself on HW, which has floating point unit. Before we finish, even 
our small devices are going all to have FPU imo ...

The cool stuff to show-off would be - bring your Red on your SD card/USB 
stick, plug-it-in, go to its dir = show "no-instal" option, show 
some GUI dialect, press a button, generate android app, and with 
one command or a dialect, push it to Google play. Then I can send 
you my friends short/long description, how long it took him to get 
his app there, downloading and installing all the JAVA crap and all 
dependencies ...

Gregg - my constructive suggestion is to orientiate on the platforms, 
which have a future. Is that an AmigaOS (to which R3 got ported as 
a paradox), is that a BeOS? Is that even a Linux? I would vote - 
Android, iOS, WP8, BB10. If new players with new potential appear, 
let's add them. How many of us would ever need to do a real native 
Linux app? And Linxu, is a big name here.

I think the check list is done :-) I think that in 2-3 months, Doc 
wants to start by - Android :-) And maybe something in that direction 
is already slowly starting to happen :-)

Doc starts with a kind of dialect - some midd level. Kind of what 
Henrik called top-down, but with good thinking ahead. you mostly 
write VID-like dialect, which would get (not necessarily 100% automatically) 
compiled to target platforms. So on Android, it looks like andorid, 
etc., but also - for small embedded - either html5, or View ...

So on Android, it looks like andorid, etc., but also - for small 
embedded - either html5, or View ...

That sounds like what Doc is proposing.

Adrian, tablets with styluses are rare now; the iPad led the way 
toward finger-only interfaces. It's been announced that the Surface 
Pro will have a stylus, but it's a passive one. The Android tablets 
with styluses are passive too, just using the stylus for a sharper 
pointer. An active stylus is an expensive peice of electronics, while 
a passive stylus is just plastic with maybe some metal or rubber 
on it, so you can see why they're preferring passive now. Hover is 
going away for a lot of platforms, or was never there for some of 
the new ones.

sounds cool :-) Lately I was wondering about the possible benefits 
of Red and R3. Difficult to judge, but could there be any overlapping 
ground, where twose two projects could cooperate? e.g your IDE for 
R3 to, simply a language would be a plugin, or - both projects want 
to address Android - could one bridge to JNI be used for both?

Doc or Kaj, do you think it would be usable on my Android tablet 
- since it uses Linux on Arm as basis ? Already I can use the R3 
port from Cyphre and the console is working fine. The single problem 
I see for now is that the Red/System app is still not working on 
my tablet ... but I suppose some time in a near future this will 
be a thing of the past. Bue Doc I don't tell you this so you feel 
yourself as if you would put more time on this issue. This is not 
even disturbing me for the moment sinc in any case I don't have much 
time left for now - so even if it already worked I couldn't use it 
anyway. It's damage I don't know more by myself about all these new 
computers and environments but I have to think I'm not alone in this 
case ... Regards

Gerard, Red currently works better on generic Linux for ARM than 
Android. All support for Linux is available on ARM, but Android is 
quite different

It's possible there's currently a problem with Red/System on Android. 
Can anyone confirm this?

Other than that, many of the libraries that I bind are not or not 
easily available on Android, so functionality is currently more limited

A possible cause of the hello app not working on Android anymore 
is a mismatch between the output encoding of Red and the expected 
one from the Java wrapper. I will check that when I'll start working 
fully on the Android port.

Just donated 50 EUR so that Red project does not feel bad by my move 
to donate also to R3/Android/GUI :-)

What can you do for Android where this is no gtk?

As for creating R/S specific site - I am not sure, how much time 
it would take to create, but unless we are able to adress devices 
like Arduino, Android devices, BeagleBoard(Bone), RaspberryPi, I 
would postpone such a solution imo ....

Livecode cross-compiles to any platform.  I can build Windows, Mac, 
Linux, Android, and Web apps, and X-code projects, with the click 
of a button *all on my Windows machine (or on a Mac or Linux box, 
if I want).

I still think as a full package, REBOL is better, but R2 is getting 
old an losing support for new, cool features and platforms.  If Cyphre 
is succesful porting R3 GUI to Android, it's got a chance.  If Doc 
gets Red evolved enough to support basic features, it's got a helluva 
chance.

Trello is a very good choice, so anyone can see what is on the list 
easily. I use it for my work and personal lists. There is Android 
app too.

I released my first game for the Android platform.


Stunt Ace is a retro type game. REBOL was used in the development 
process to make a prototype and for the level editor.

Stunt Ace can be found on Google play.
Full version:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nicom.stuntace
Free trial:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nicom.stuntacefree

Stunt Ace was made using:
- Deluxe Paint on an Amiga
- GIMP
- Waldorf Pulse analogue synthesizer
- TimewARP 2600 analogue soft synth
- Roland A-90 keyboard
- A Mac
- A PC
- REBOL
- In-house software

Have fun!

I've added executables for all six current Red target platforms: 
Syllable, Linux, Linux-ARM, Android, Darwin (OS X) and MSDOS (Windows)

My game, Stunt Ace, has been released to iOS (iPhone, which also 
works on iPad).


Stunt Ace is a retro type game. REBOL was used in the development 
process to make a prototype and for the level editor. I also used 
the REBOL DRAW dialect to create the logo, icon and presentation 
graphics.


Stunt Ace can be found on Apple's App Store. The Android version 
can be found on Google Play.

Homepage: http://niclasen.name/stuntace.html

Stunt Ace was made using:
- Deluxe Paint on an Amiga
- GIMP
- Waldorf Pulse analogue synthesizer
- TimewARP 2600 analogue soft synth
- Roland A-90 keyboard
- A Mac
- A PC
- REBOL
- In-house software

Have fun!

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?

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...)

Is yours also workig on android and iPhone yet? :)))

Android binary is twice the size of Linux one because ARMv5 architecture 
is bad at dealing with 32-bit literal values, so it takes much more 
space than for IA-32.

Pekr, he already did port it to ARM Linux, but at the time noone 
working on the project had an ARM machine to test with other than 
an Android phone. And porting the core to Android is the simple part; 
the host would need to be rewritten almost completely for Android 
due to the different application model. Noone was using Amiga either. 
The only alternate platform that was getting any use by the project 
members was Syllable.

Pekr, he already did port it to ARM Linux, but at the time noone 
working on the project had an ARM machine to test with other than 
an Android phone.


Maybe I fall into the "no one working on the project" category, but 
I had ARM machines available for at least the last 6 years or so. 
Last time Carl was rumored to have ported to ARM (most likely "again"), 
I was certainly around, with ARM machines, offering to test :)

IIRC he actually use the Android NDK compiler to do that build. But 
don't take my word for it.

Robert, does the android port currently have GUI support?

What version of Android is needed for R3droid.apk ?

Connected with WiFi on Android 4.0 on Motorola Electrify 2, trying 
to run the test script, I get the following:

(I've tested it on Android 2.3 (GINGERBREAD) phone and it works well.)

Motorola Electrify 2 - 1.2GHz dual-core - Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

[1161 524 16 0] [1160 528 16 0] [1158 525 16 0] (three runs)

Daughter has a HP touchpad running Android.  Should work?

I imagine anything running Android should work.  I don't know if 
the architecture of the processor matters, but I think it must not 
because I don't see different compilations of Angry Birds for different 
Android processor architectures.

Robert and Cyphre : As already stated under the Android group I have 
succeessfully tested the new console based R3 for Android under my 
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet - running Android 3.2. works well 
- thanks again a lot for this achievement - I wil shortly follow 
with some donation - simply waiting for my next salary deposit ...

Graham, it should work on anything that has at least Android 2.2 
and an arm cpu. Moreover the APK contains additional build  of the 
R3 interpreter for arm cpus that have hardware floating point operations. 
I haven't made any benchamrks so I don't know if this is really performance 
advantage (in case of Rebol code) for Devices with such better and 
newer hardware.

I'm proud to say I have the second fastest Android phone tested so 
far. ;-)  I am SO excited for the future, especially for the Android 
network and file access and the graphics port.  Cyphre, how do we 
make donations again?

Bo, I upped my matching donation and additional $500 today.  Cyphre's 
doing fantastic work on Android.  Please help them stay funded, and 
I'll match donations.

So we currently have another 20 days we can spend on the Android 
port.

Robert, when you say that I can make a donation to Saphirion, does 
that help Cyphre with his Android port?  Or is that a different fund? 
 It sounds like it is the same fund because Endo's $100 donation 
added some days to the Android port, but I just wanted to be clear.

There is a different fund for Red as well, correct?

It's been a difficult year financially, but I wanted to donate something, 
so just donated $20 to Saphirion for the Android port.

Thanks Andreas, Cyphre, Robert and all the others actively implied 
in R3 dev, the ongoing progress and all the tools you shared and 
have committed online. The R3Droid chat works well under my Android 
3.2 (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1). and the chat also runs fine under 
my Win7 Toshiba -  from the binaries set online at http://www.rebolsource.net

Max you have to understand that most users already use Altme, and 
Stack overflow these days.   rebol.org and Github are there for source 
sharing.


R3 is not dying, its not Carl's job of moving it forward.  R3 is 
now on Android, for example, this wasn't available just a month ago.

Android release: That is great Robert!

For example it would be nice to see the actual Android work in progress.

Some more Android port info. Since some people around were asking 
if it will be possible to 'encap' scripts with the Android R3 I've 
spent some time researching/prototyping in this area and I think 
I can now answer this question positively. It surely will be possible 
to make "encapper" for R3 on Android and my current prototype results 
show that we'll be able to do it without the need to install any 
SDK or other bloated instalations. It will be just one good-old "encapper 
exe" that will do the job for you.

Robert and Cyphere - Thank you so much for the Android version!

BTW Carl restarted the "R3 chat" server so you can just type: "chat" 
in the Android console and leave message here.

With the latest Android version it is nice to try type: HELP in the 
chat input prompt to see the BROWSE works nicely ;)

Cyphre has a huge responsibility getting R3GUI running on Android. 
 Everything he's ever created for REBOL has been top notch.  If we 
had 5 - 10 more Cyphres in this community, REBOL would be in a totally 
different place.

I see. Thanks. I also tried to get the android version to run on 
my Nexus 7.No luck there so I went back to trying the test that was 
originally posted and I can't even get that to run. Sorry, you'll 
need a more experienced test. :-(

There have been failure reports before, so something low level may 
be wrong with current Red on Android

I tried request-file in the android build, it didn't crash but nothing 
showed up. Not that I needed it - I was just curious.

The android version doesn't have thesee calls implemented yet (AFAIK 
android doesn't have any "default OS" requesters for that so we need 
to do it ourself or reuse custom code)

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.

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.

We are running through mud with Javascript.  We need R3 on iOS or 
we may have to change our approach to research on student learning. 
 Some of you are going to say, "Use Android"  Schools aren't bying 
Androids.  They are buying iPads (believe it or not) and now they 
have the mini.

Is anyone working on R3 for Android/iOS?

How much of a bounty is it worth to compele the Android port, with 
GUI?

I am very interested in a combined iOS/Android project.  Something 
a little more extensive than just a port.  Are you guys interested?

Not sure how much Android and iOS could be combined, more than REBOL 
is already cross-platform

If you have a request that R3 be ported to another platform, here's 
the place for it. You might want to keep in mind that iOS and Android 
have their own groups, but if you just want to get it to compile 
on their respective SDKs then this is the place :)

Android and iOS.  How much of a bounty do I need to offer for R3 
with GUI on Android?

Thanks Pekr.  I spoke with Cyphre too - waiting to here if he's interested 
in being sponsored, and how much it would cost to make Android a 
priority.

Has anyone tried compiling R3 for ARM Linux? This affects RPi, Android, 
and misc. micro-servers.

Actually, Oldes, that's a great idea!  R3's new GUI could be built 
to utilize OpenGL by default.  That way, the GPU would handle all 
the graphics calls, and R3 would have 3D capabilities built-in as 
a bonus!  This would probably even make porting to Android and other 
platforms a lot easier.  In fact, doesn't IOS (iPhone) use OpenGL?

It is. OpenGL ES2.0. As well as Android. Actually I don't think there 
is a chance to do GUI on these platforms without OpenGL.

Also note that on Android for example the Canvas class (which is 
comparable to DRAW) is still not HW accelerated AFAIK.

I believe the Android porting effort will show us what is the optimal 
solution. It is good to find a balance between highly optimized but 
not much compatible HW engine and smoething that is fast enough and 
can be ported without big pain.

Cyphre, thanks for that info.  So does the R3GUI framework work on 
all current R3 platforms?  I understand Android is a no, but everything 
else?