[REBOL] Re: P2P Q&A
From: holger:rebol at: 2-Oct-2001 7:03
On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 02:29:50PM +0200, Petr Krenzelok wrote:
> > No, I never said that. I am not sure what you mean by real
> > multi-threading vs. soft multi-threading. We do plan to add support
> > for multi-threading, just not immediately.
>
> Ah, I am sorry then, take my apology. Maybe I wrongly understood your following quote:
>
> "On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 08:50:42PM +0200, Maarten Koopmans wrote:
> -> Doing things in the background suggests that you switch to a multithreaded
> -> stack-based machine?
>
> No, still single-threaded, but switching to a state machine-driven
> protocol engine, triggered from within 'wait and some other natives."
These are two different issues. One is support for network i/o
virtually in the background
, using asynchronous ports. That is
something planned for the not-too-distant future (Core 3.0). This
will not require multi-threading. Multi-threading at the language
level is a different issue. It IS planned, but for later.
> That's cool. As we speak probably some more distant future, are some multi-media related
> things thought of already? Some of us would be interested probably in knowing, how/where
> will View evolve from its current state ....
We will have to see. Technically, there is not much of a problem. The
internal View engine handles dynamic data better than any other
graphical compositing system I have ever seen. The timer limitations in
the current version really only exist because that part of View was
written before we rewrote the event system for Core 2.3, but we should
be able to allow 1 ms granularity in faces fairly soon. Of course
whether the CPU can handle it everywhere is a different issue :-).
Multi-media, of course, requires streaming, but this is something
planned for Core 3.0 as well, at least for network protocols and some
utility ports (encryption, compression and checksums).
The really big hurdle for multi-media is licensing, especially in
cross-platform environments. People these days expect support for .avi,
.mpg, .mov, .rp etc., and many codecs. In many cases this is technically
possible, but not legally, and only on few platforms. I would expect
support for this in REBOL to be driven primarily by commercial demand
and very particular licensing requests, so it is difficult to make any
predictions at this time.
--
Holger Kruse
[holger--rebol--com]
