[REBOL] Re: R3 Beta availability
From: rgaither::triad::rr::com at: 6-Sep-2007 19:38
Hi Henrik,
Thanks for your responses (Brian's as well) , always good to see
details and hear plans.
>> I'm very glad there is a massive array of them but not knowing what
>> they are, beyond manually pulling tidbits out of Carl's blog posts
>> and AltMe discussions is a bit maddening.
>
> There is not a single definitive list, but "massive array" means also
> features that are in R2, because R3 is rewritten from the ground up,
> so everything needs to be re-tested systematically. Also R3 is not
> yet in feature freeze, so new things are added all the time.
I understand the situation and don't envy the alpha tester group for
the amount of work involved at all.
[snip - good collection of features]
Thanks for sharing some pieces of the new puzzle, look forward to
playing with them.
> There are many changes in the language, where most will reduce the
> amount of code you need to write and a tiny few bits where you need
> to write a little more, mostly to reduce internal complexity and give
> better performance.
The amount of code you have to write in REBOL is already very small,
a little increase won't be an issue at all in my opinion. The key
for me is the stronger support for larger scale efforts or combined
efforts from multiple sources.
> In many places R3 is much faster than R2. The graphics system
> performs much better. We had an early internal demo that painted 1000
> icons randomly in an 800x600 window continuously. It worked in both
> R2 and R3, but was on average 4-5 times faster in R3. Even better
> when scaling it up to 10000 icons, it would take *minutes* in R2 to
> render a single frame on my PC, while still keeping at 1-2 FPS on R3,
> while consuming much less memory. R3 scales much better graphically,
> but I'm told that final optimizations are not yet done.
This is good news and should make for some very interesting new kinds
of applications. I want to point out how much of a boost it is for
REBOL to have the built in graphics support and multiple platform
support together. This is a big weak spot in the Ruby world and
while Java has it the value is lost in the mountain of things you
have to do to use it. Scala could change the value proposition some
in the JVM world if the right kind of layers are built but for now it
doesn't have them.
> is buggy and slow. I think OSX is the first one to come, and then
> Linux, but it depends on who will do the porting and how ninja
> skilled they are. :-)
Also good news as I'm not going the wine route either, just not worth
the time to me.
Thanks again, Rod.
