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R3 is not TDD, it is a long time - TBD :-)

What can we do, Gabriele wanted it and it seemed like a good idea 
at the time. He convinced me.

I'm not satisfied by the Rebol solution of scanning the string each 
time a MOLD is done, I wonder if there's any better solution.

Not sure if you have time to do that before the release, but it would 
be good to avoid creating legacy code

I probably won't have time to finish file! before going to sleep, 
so you'll get it tomorrow.

Better specify it clearly each time you announce comparative performances, 
else people will generalize it and get a wrong picture of the real 
performance ratios. 


Fibonacci basically tests the efficiency of the function calls. A 
test with a bigger loop could be interesting. For example, you can 
take the %demo.red script and strip all screen outputs, add a LOOP 
around the main code and  you'll should see much bigger differences.

Now that REDUCE is implemented, I suppose it's time for PRINT to 
reduce its argument?

Almost time to wake up...but I haven't gone to sleep yet. :-) Good 
night!

Doc, will we have anything like R3 environment stuff - e.g. delayed 
loading/bootstraping, some debug stuff, being able to trace memory, 
time of running app, etc?

There are some things in R3, particularly some of the things that 
the module system can do, that probably won't make sense to do in 
Red because it's compiled. Delay-loading modules won't be as important 
for Red because most of the overhead of creating a module can be 
done ahead of time when it's compiled. It would make sense to support 
the delaying feature because you might want to have a module's side 
effects happen at a particular time, but the delay can happen a lot 
later in the process than it would in R3. Red might benefit from 
the options specification method and some other aspects of its surface 
API and behavioral model, but the implementation would be completely 
different. The restrictions we made to make the module system statically 
resolvable (in R3's case by a preprocessor like prebol or Ladislav's 
include) would be a lot more important for Red than they have been 
so far for R3, because compilation makes static resolution more important.

Also, this bug occurs only on Windows, so having users from other 
platfomrs type it too is overkill. I would like to reduce the steps 
and commands to type for running the Red(/System) compiler (especially 
for the first time), not increase them.

now gives a string with date and time, but using  the refinements 
dont't give back a result.
This is on Windows XP

There are so many things to get excited about all the time these 
days!

Once rebol went open source and decided it's time to return to rebol, 
it was rather frustrating for me to find resources about rebol. I'd 
like to create such a page for other people's convenience. Should 
it be reboler.com or rebolista.com or anything else? The page will 
be a compilation of resources that will help newcomers get an idea 
of what rebol is all about and how to get started, such as: where 
to get the latest news, relevant contributors, blogs, important libraries, 
etc. I'd like to register the domain tonight and have the page ready 
in a couple of weeks. Not a big deal - just a quick reference at 
least for myself. Please suggest name and stuff to put on the page. 
Congrats to the community for sticking to rebol thru the quiet times 
- I did not.

GiuseppeC: Thanks. I will consider all the available resources. I 
have little time available. Most rebol related resources seem dated 
though.

They've all been in that one test repository for some time

For the ventilator example, I implemented simple versions of to-integer, 
ASK, now/precise and subtract-time:

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

Great news, Robert! Can hardly wait for the UI part. Will you be 
putting any of this stuff in a public repo any time soon?

In Carl's defense, just because someone is a genius with code architecture 
and development doesn't mean they are perfect in other areas, like 
finding time to work on free projects.


As an example, look at Albert Einstein.  An absolute genius in many 
things, but absolutely horrible in others.  I guess it's a trade-off. 
 If you're going to be really good at something, you have to be really 
bad at something else, or at least below average in a bunch of things. 
 I guess that's better than being average at everything.

Just in case nobody saw, Carl wrote in R3 github the following:

Been busy. Will check-in more frequently in March.


Sorry folks, Dec-Feb is the "crazy crazy busy" time for new product 
development. Yes, I know, I'm bad. But, I'm quite addicted to making 
new products... especially cute little electronic ones that sell 
in all the major stores in the US. Each one presents special new 
challenges that I just can't resist.


Starting in March I'll break away for a few hours a week to take 
care of things here.


Also... I really want to try using R3 with graphics running on DirectFB. 
It would be quite cool.


One other thing... has anyone got R3 running graphics on Raspberry 
Pi yet? If not, let's talk about how we can make that happen. What 
do we need?

Some people have wanted to do timing with Red. That was already possible 
with wall clock time, but I've added a new function get-process-seconds 
to both Red and Red/System to get the CPU time used by the process. 
Be aware that on Windows, this still uses wall clock time:

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

I've included examples in the Red Fibonacci examples.

I made an OS-Mesa backend on SDL for my Red/System OpenGL binding:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-OpenGL/dir?ci=tip


This does off-screen rendering in a memory buffer using the Mesa3D 
engine and then displays the result using SDL. Somehow I can't get 
it to work on Linux, but it's the first time I can use Red/System 
for OpenGL on Syllable. It circumvents two problems: the PicoGL library 
expects application functions that Red doesn't export, and Syllable's 
SDL port doesn't support the official OpenGL backend, so those routes 
both don't work. For most other targets than Syllable, the official 
SDL backend can be used.


It's also the first time that I have used my Mesa3D port to Syllable. 
I couldn't display the output before, because there is no display 
driver for the current Mesa3D versions for Syllable, just the standard 
off-screen rendering. It works great, even though it does only software 
rendering. PicoGL is a bit faster, but Mesa3D is a much more modern 
and complete OpenGL implementation.

But, you should *really* use a async HTTP client, that's the best 
solution for your need (multiple HTTP downloads at the same time).

hmmm. ok...will work on this and get back to you
thanks for the time Doc

Kaj: 
love your r2 bindings for zeromq 
i've been trying to implement the push-pull ventilator example

ventilator:
REBOL []

do %zmq.r

pool: zmq/new-pool 1
socket: zmq/open pool zmq/push
zmq/serve socket tcp://*:5555

ventilate: func[][
  print "sending"
  u: form time/now/precise
  zmq/send socket to-binary u 0
]

wait 0:00:60 [
  ventilate
]

worker:
REBOL []

do %zmq.r

pool: zmq/new-pool 1
socket: zmq/open pool zmq/pull
zmq/connect socket tcp://*:5555

data: copy #{}

forever [
  zmq/receive socket data 0
  prin ["."] 
  print to-string data
]

...but the worker crashes

good to know!

i haven't seen janko around in a long time - i've been interested 
in using his distributed actors library, but cant find it online 
anywhere

just about every time I've had to fix something with VID it was related 
to the fact that redraw is being used.  its a very bad design... 
redraw should never have been put into the feel.   its also a big 
slowdow, since it forces every face to redraw itself when you show 
a pane.

Yes, it is thanks. I stumbled across a case where I had to run DEHEX 
twice because it skipped a few values the first time.

Sadly, not been able to replicate that in a one-liner, so it may 
have been something stupid I did.

it may in fact refer to some part of the RFC which prohibits character 
0 from URLs (which I am guessing is the case, haven't read that RFC 
for a time).


 in this context, it makes sense to leave it there, but if using dehex 
 for other purposes its annoying.

Hello, all.


 Back in May I was here asking for lots of help in creating a simple 
 CGI script in REBOL. Wanted to say thanks. It was most appreciated, 
 especially considering how rarely you get new people my questions 
 must have seemed so simple to the point of boring the crap out of 
 all of you hardcore experts. My regular job has insane hours and 
 months pass by in what seems like minutes. The person I was doing 
 it for suddenly had other things come up on his website and business 
 that required attention first so it fell by the wayside. I intend 
 to pick it up where I left off this week during an evening when I 
 have more time. While I had a few minutes I had to send my thanks.


 And I see REBOL might become open source... good to see it  moving 
 forward instead of stagnating.

Endo,  a lot of stuff in rebol is learned by scanning the source 
code... and probing or using help on system and its members.


you can probe all the port handlers to see how they work, I still 
do this all the time... most of the very skilled Rebolers know , 
above all else, how to browse the rebol source included in the interpreter 
itself.

Thanks BrianH. I am aware of the need to "keep your untrustworthy 
data that you can't safely DO separate from that code."


I am creating a small Rebol server capable of communicating with 
clients, using RSA key exchange and the blowfish algorithm, both 
of which work to reasonably high encryption levels in Rebol, 4096 
for RSA and 512 for Blowfish (yes I know the effective upper limit 
for Blowfish is 448 bits, but that is good enough for my purposes).


I want to save the RSA key as a block so it can be loaded back into 
the program and used again, hence my question. It will be encrypted, 
wherever it gets saved, so there will be no chance of it being messed 
with.


Actually, I am writing a much simpler version of Rebol Services, 
since I could not get that to work and my ability to code in Rebol 
was not sufficiently developed yet to see how to get it working.


I am in a steep learning curve right now with Rebol and the time 
I am investing is starting to pay off. Thanks for the information 
about keeping code and data separate. It's always good to be reminded 
of 'obvious' truths.

For R2: native loops are faster than mezzanine (function) loops, 
so much faster that their individual differences amongst themselves 
are almost irrelevant. For R3 all loops are native (except FIND-ALL, 
temporarily), so the big difference is one-time-per-call bind/copy 
overhead for binding loops, versus not having that for non-binding 
loops.

Hmm, I do (I once submitted it to Carl, but he never used it). Nevertheless, 
in my code I prefer a general loop called CFOR (the name is unfortunate, 
I must admit). That is what I propose instead since it is both faster 
and more flexible at the same time. Do you think it makes sense to 
propose it in the CC?

Agreed with both of you on naming. Now is the time to consider what 
to change in R3 and what to use in Red. 'Closure has meaning beyond 
Ladislav's current examples. Do we name things for new users and 
novices, or experts? For me, name things clearly, and supplement 
with docs if the names don't match expectation.

related, tests which show that run-time rebinding must be avoided 
at all costs.   if closures are forced to rebind, there will be a 
hit.


my question was initially to know if you had done tests with closure 
itself... cause I  am curious how well it compares to the default 
case of doing it all on the interpreter side.

Here is an example with a complex body:

f: func [n x y] [
	loop n [
		loop n [
			loop n [
				x + y
			]
		]
	]
]

c: closure [n x y] [
	loop n [
		loop n [
			loop n [
				x + y
			]
		]
	]
]

>> time-block [f 10 10 20] 0,05
== 0.00017675781250000002

>> time-block [c 10 10 20] 0,05
== 0.000158203125

OK, now I know the answer and it is time to confess it.  I have complained 
a number of times about how obscure REBOL is (to me) and how I sometimes 
can look at ONE LINE of code and not understand it. I wonder, is 
it REBOL, or is it me.   Well, I am learning python for work, and 
I want to replce the html lt and gt symbols with their character 
entities or whatever they are called, I found a sample on the internet, 
wrote up a test program, copied the sample, and it worked.  So here 
I am looking at ONE LINE of python code and I don't understand how 
it works.  So, the answer to, is it REBOL or is it me, is, IT'S ME. 
 I think I'm in the wrong line of work.

In most languages it is possible to do things in one line. Very often 
the result is that it is hard to understand what happens in that 
line. In the light of maintainable code I have the attitude that 
I rather deal with less comlicated code that is possibly a little 
slower. If that is not an option (most of the time performance stays 
way within limits even if it is readable) then I leave a big comment 
what the code is about. For sure the next guy/girl will appreciate 
this when it is their turn. There have been many occasions that I 
myself was the assigned the next adaptations and only a few months 
later these comments really were helpful.

It's even in the lates public source release here: http://development.saphirion.com/downloads/
so if anyone have time to make pull-request?

Hey all, I'm having such a good time learning again!


I've got some code to generate a print ruler, but I think it could 
be cleaned up a lot more.   

If some of you have a quick moment, could you take a quick look and 
advise me on how to shorten this code.

ruler1: copy ruler2: ""
idx: 0
loop 110 [
	idx: idx + 1
	append ruler1 "_"
	append ruler2 last-digit: last to-string idx
	if last-digit = #"5" [
		clear back tail ruler1
		append ruler1 "+"
		]	
	if last-digit = #"0" [
		either idx < 99 [clear back back tail ruler1]
			[clear back back back tail ruler1]
		append ruler1 to-string idx
		]
	]
replace/all ruler2 "0" "_"
print ruler1
print ruler2



____+___10____+___20____+___30____+___40____+___50____+___60____+___70____+___80____+___90____+__100____+__110

123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_ 123456789_123456789_ 
123456789_123456789_ 123456789_123456789_

Thanks to all that helped. Learning all the time.  I think I have 
the code pretty tight now!  A lot better than my first attempt.  
Final solution:

ruler-len: 80

ruler-1: head insert/dup (copy "") "----+----."	to-integer (ruler-len 
+ 9 / 10)
ruler-1: head clear (skip ruler-1 ruler-len)		; trim excess
r1: skip head ruler-1 9				; adv to pos 10
forskip r1 10 [	adj: ((length? idx: to-string (index? r1)) - 1)
				change skip r1 (-1 * adj) idx		]
ruler-1: head r1					; r1 is at tail

ruler-2: head insert/dup (copy "") "123456789." to-integer (ruler-len 
+ 9 / 10)
ruler-2: head clear (skip ruler-2 ruler-len)	; trim excess
print-ruler:	does [print ruler-1 print ruler-2]

I have a question about timezones. I need to make a selector for 
workonomic where user can set the TimeZone Like "Europe/Ljubljana" 
 instead of TZ offset which changes between summer/winter time depending 
on the timezone etc..

Thanks Gabriele, I found by googling that mysql can have timezone 
database installed and has the functions to handle it then. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805538/in-mysql-caculating-offset-for-a-time-zone
(the second answer, with a link of how to install if anyone else 
will be looking)

With parameterized queries (even in REBOL) the SQL and the parameters 
are sent separately and combined in the server. The query plan is 
generated only once per query, with the parameter placeholders being 
in the plan. Then the actual parameters are plugged into the plan. 
The next time the parameterized query is called (maybe with differe3nt 
parameter values) the same plan is used and the new parameter values 
are plugged in.

If you build a query dynamically with rejoin or something, the query 
is put together client side and then the server has to generate a 
new query plan for each distinct set of parameter values. This takes 
time and blows the query plan cache, which slows down the whole query 
process.

hey guys... i have just 2days time for my project ! could you help 
me?

I do like a lot of the REBOL docs, which took time and effort to 
create. Wikis are good for reference information. I agree with Arnold 
that good examples are important. I'll add that giving people a starting 
point is helpful. For example, have example scripts for different 
types of apps or features; CGI, pipe and filter, command line handling, 
etc.


I also think format fragmentation is bad. REBOL's docs are fragmented, 
which makes it hard to know the best place to put something. Being 
able to share data, or have a common doc db that can be rendered 
in different ways, would be great.

Doc, for implementation details, you and a few others who know will 
have to provide the basic information. If there is cleanup and wordsmithing 
to be done, as long as others can edit it easily, I would leave that 
to someone else. Write the best doc you can, of course, but don't 
worry if it's not perfect. Your time should be spent doing things 
nobody else can do as well, using what you know, and what you know 
is planned.


For friendly user reference, do you have a style of docs you want 
to mimic, or an idea of how you want the doc data managed? e.g., 
do you want to use a wiki, so that infrastructure is all there?

Gabriele wrote a MakeDoc GUI a long time ago.

I'm trying the github Windows client, which should sync, but only 
have my fork in it right now. I thought the target workflow (in general) 
was to fork, push to that, then submit a pull request. My problem 
is spending little time on it, then letting it sit idle while it 
leaks out of my brain.

We are studying the technology and student learning at the same time.

The last result is GCC 4.3.2 + glibc 2.7 at compile time, glibc 2.16 
at runtime.

Not sure if someone's around here on AltME with the time, skill and 
interest to work on that.

Scot, Saphirion's R3GUI is used in our Treemapper application: http://www.tree-mapper.com/


It's a bit ugly right now, because I haven't had time to work on 
the skin yet.

Well, to save you some time you should get the R3 form repository 
either from Andreas or me on github. These repos are work in progress 
for Win/mingw at the moment (maybe others have simmilar repos as 
well)

Max, the problem is that most web tools actually suck... not because 
their developpers are bad... but because the web, as a platform sucks... 
in all regards.   its slow, super complex, apps break up every other 
month, and even the basic framework on which the web is layers was 
NEVER meant to be used like it, so even that is corrupted to start 
with.  Also, the apps we use keep changing from under our feet, which 
as a user we have NO control, and it gets very tiresome... it seems 
like every other time I log on to any of the bigger web sites, its 
changed, and I'm lost... again.


I have not seen a single altme-like product which I could chat in 
**real-time** with many people in groups as we do here.   its always 
either super slow, very slugish, insanely complex or insanely dumb. 
 


The only platform which has some appeal so far is the Stack Overflow 
engine, which has a pretty good architecture... but man would it 
be sooo much better if it wasn't built over web technologies...

Maxim, I agree that AltME is a great platform, but it could be much 
better.  For instance, things like the Calendar and Checklists that 
work OK, but are not really polished and feature-rich yet.  But I 
think AltME could be made to look a lot better by borrowing from 
some concepts seen in Facebook and Google+, and maybe even have an 
almost-real-time bi-directional link to a web forum for people who 
need to access the groups from a web browser.


Another thing that I would really prefer would be to allow connection 
to multiple AltME worlds from within a single AltME window.


Hmm...if AltME was also open-sourced, we could start adding these 
features!  I have a more feature-rich calendar I could add right 
away. ;-)

I've had a number of face-to-face conversations with Carl recently, 
and I don't get that feeling at all.  I'm sure it's just a matter 
of time - Carl is highly pressed for time in his current job.  Plus, 
now he is spending a lot of time looking over the R3 code changes 
on git and merging them.

No worries, It's the first time I mention it.

AdrianS:  That is a better question.  What have we learned about 
the approach taken by MDP versus MarkDown.  I am personally much 
more inline with the approach taken by MDP.  It hasn't been attended 
to in quite some time.

I've spent a lot of time with MDP, written a whole distributed application 
with pages based upon the principles of MDP.  The biggest mess in 
MDP is the need to make HTML pages, which is a fossil and pretty 
awful, but widespread.  People need HTML so we output that.  People 
may want PDF, or RTF or Postscript or MarkDown, or whatever.  Those 
parts will always be a mess because the formats of all those outputs 
are a mess.

I've also spent quite a lot of time with MDP as well building now 
around 2 megabytes of manuals with it, and I spent some time adding 
new features to it. I wanted to add a glossary feature, but it's 
quite strained with what we can do now. The HTML part is not so bad. 
The line parser is much worse, both because we are running out of 
space for sensible inline rules (which all are one-char and markdown 
doesn't have this limitation), and the code itself is not very well 
organized.

If you are talking about the existing R3 console, the problem was 
that he couldn't make a real console-mode R3 program without losing 
functionality that he only knew how to support in GUI-mode programs, 
and he couldn't make a GUI-mode app use the Windows console without 
allocating its own console window, which lost all of the advantages. 
It's not to say that this can't be done, just that noone who had 
the interest and ability to do this had made the effort, because 
it was low-priority for the contributors at the time. With more contributors 
now, perhaps this will get fixed.

now, as the situation has changes, some minor topic, but maybe better 
to open it sooner than later - some ppl adopted .r3 extension for 
R3. When working with console, I constantly forget to type .r3 and 
type .r instead. I know, that we want to distinguish R2 to R3 scripts, 
but as R2 is most probably not going to be opensourced, and although 
it will serve us well for quite some time, what about once again 
get back to .r extension even for R3?

LevelDB, if anything. But I don't expect to get to that any time 
soon.

digit: charset [ #"0" - #"9" ]
alpha: charset [ #"a" - #"z" #"A" - #"Z" ]
idate-to-date: func [ date [string!] /local day month year zone]
[

 either parse date [ 5 skip copy day 2 digit space copy month 3 alpha 
 space copy year 4 digit space copy time to space space copy zone 
 to end ][
		if zone = "GMT" [ zone: copy "+0" ]
		to date! rejoin [ day "-" month "-" year "/" time zone ]
	][ none ]
]


if headers/last-modified [info/date: attempt [ idate-to-date headers/last-modified] 
]
		
seems to work

for example, synchronous operations are just a hack, they fail if 
you try to download a larger file as there is a time limit to the 
whole operation.

yeah, time flies. :)

not in the short term, i don't really have time for it. no idea what 
happens long term. :)

it's higher priority than R3 for me, but i'm not sure if i'll be 
able to work on it in the next 2-3 months. things should settle after 
that though, and hopefully i'll be able to plan again and carve some 
serious time for it.

I create little Rebol/Services from time to time.  Would be nice 
to have a spec that makes it quick and easy.

I've updated the time scheme and uploaded it to github here https://github.com/gchiu/Rebol3/blob/master/protocols/prot-time.r

Looks like it's time to setup one's own r3 build environment to test 
these things out

The time protocol mentioned in Vanity seems to need a change in design. 
There should never be a need for READ to have an /args option - that 
is what the path and query stuff are for.

Instead of this:
    read/args time://time.nist.gov [ GMT ]
it should be this:
    read time://time.nist.gov/gmt

Nonetheless, the plan was to have a user preferences system, with 
preferences persisted to a user-specific data file named user.r, 
in a declarative dialect (specifically no procedural code allowed 
in user.r). Unfortunately, that last sentence is as far as the plan 
got. We were going to have a community discussion about this, but 
hadn't gotten around to it yet because we're still too early in the 
development. Maybe now's a good time to start that discussiion.

Private

 modules were a side effect of the module name being optional. If 
 a module doesn't have a name, you can't check for whether it is already 
 loaded, so you have to load it again every time it is requested. 
 The module itself can't even tell if it was loaded before, so it 
 can't know whether it needs to resolve conflicts between itself and 
 other instances of itself. That makes it basically unsafe to have 
 an unnamed module export to lib. So instead, we skip the lib middleman 
 and import those exports directly into the target module or user 
 context, which makes the unnamed module effectively owned by that 
 target, a "private" module.


We found this facility useful enough that we added an explicit option 
to make it private (options: [private]). That makes it possible to 
have a named private module, which has some interesting abilities 
just from having a name. Having a name means that you can have the 
module load only once, and being private means that if you want to 
use its exports you have to import the module explicitly, so combined 
it means an explicitly accessed module that can share resources with 
other targets that also explicitly import the same module.

I know what Carl uses as his email and yes, I knew it wasn't what 
I wrote above.  Last time I looked he had an s at the end of this 
name.

You mean waiting for a condition, rather than for a port, time or 
duration?

wait does not work with date!, it works with time.

I can reproduce it like clockwork. It even crashes in the same spot 
every time. Send me your test binaries!

Oh, and if a value is a function, that function will be called every 
time with an argument of the string at the position of the escape. 
We need to test for that too. This makes *really* flexible replacement 
possible.

maybe, historically, also the licence was a problem? Remember, R3 
was not open-sourced back at that time ...

It's quite a long time I used rip last time so my memory may be faded 
out, what do you mean with the application states?

ZIP support would be great. I've wanted it for a long time, but want 
more than just a "compress this value" function. i.e. it needs to 
work like a port or have an interface that lets us navigate, list, 
etc.

I've been doing some work to clarify the potential markets.  Just 
doing it part time now, but I think there's real potential.

Andreas, yes exactly these considerations are important because the 
sore temptation could lead into an overload and therefore polluted 
R3 with embedded extensions beyond a usefull 'R3 with batteries included' 
;-) 

there are tons of usefull libs and free code out there, compression, 
crypto, text processing, serialisation, image manipulation, audio, 
math, ai and very important;  db connectors. filling these areas 
step by step is a lot of work but I think it's worth. As soon R3 
has reached a stable structure (couple of weeks I think) a new bounty 
system should be established for extensions we need but haven't the 
time or skills to create those. Just now I started with a simple 
one to get a feeling for the handling and any advise in this is highly 
appreciated.

NickA: during my private talks to Cyphre, he told me that if he would 
aproach the View engine nowadays, he would abstract it a bit, so 
that it could use various rendering backends - AGG, Cairo, so that 
where platform permits, it could be HW accelerated. But - such project 
would take some time, and Cyphre would have to be sponsored, in order 
to be able to do the work. I think, that it could be even written 
in a way, so that both R3 and Red benefit. But who knows ...


As for Red - no party is willing to port View engine, yet :-) Doc 
wants to aproach it other way - to use something like VID dialect, 
but final toolkit used would be the native platform one. Kaj did 
some example with Red/System + GTK, if I understand it correctly. 
I still think that even for Red, something like small View  engine 
would be benefical, e.g. for embedded work, where non traditional 
graphics is not a problem.


Dunno, how difficult would it be to get View sources adapted to Red/System. 
Red is missing on timers, events, etc., so maybe later, so that it 
can be naturally plugged in to its architecture ...

We did a short test some time ago to use OpenGL, works but is quite 
some work to implement it completely.

But good news is some people are experimenting with shaders to created 
2d oriented engines but until the main players on the market won't 
set some standard it can still take lot of time.

Oldes, I don't argue with you and Bo about that. I think we all know 
the state of this technology. I've already did several prototypes 
of such "engine" so I have some ideas how this could be done for 
R3 it's just matter of prioritizing&time&resources.

I wrote about the drawing apis just so other people know OpenGL is 
not any Messiah if you want to do hi-quality 2d vector graphics in 
realtime.

I'm not against HW acceleration at all. It's just not easy topic 
in this non-ideal programming world as you pointed out.

I see the solution with good high quality rasterizer + HW accelerated 
compositing engine. That should be flexible setup at least IMHO. 
Plus this way also we got the classic 3d api for free.

That's what I did for my vanity builds for integrating the time and 
smtp schemes

There are many broken link on R2/Desktop for long time, unfortunately.

Well, if you want to use 'web app'  which tries a bit to not  resemble 
just "HTML page" you have to always use the most updated browsers. 
I think this rule will hold for very long time :-)

I switched to use
https://ixquick.com/
for many searches, after Google was changed some time ago.

I don't know. :) I also use
https://duckduckgo.com/
from time to time. I think, that's privacy friendly.

I think, I'm two OS versions behind on my iPhone, and it says, it 
has 26 app updates for me.

I'm one OS X version behind on my MacBook and found out the other 
day, my Xcode is 'old' too. So what? It works.

I haven't updated my Windows and Linux 'machines' in VirtualBox for 
years.


I just can't waste my time on all this updating to "now even more, 
newer, better". It's rubbish! :)

Writing the NLPP program, one of the very biggest challenges was 
to make a no-hassle upgrade procedure. This was one of the hardest 
things to do and also one of the parts that took up most time to 
code and test.

(That assessment is based on my view that there is quite a bit of 
capacity available which could work full-time on R3.)

encappable

 of course. What do we need to make that happen in terms of development 
 time? Then, how much money do we need fo rthat (nt all developers 
 need to be paid full-time, some do it as hobby). Etc.