[REBOL] Re: General REBOL questions
From: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 16-Jun-2002 11:06
Brian wrote:
> Hello,
> I've been looking into REBOL/View recently and it looks really
> terrific. I have some generic questions if someone knowledgable has a
> moment:
>
> 1) As everything in REBOL is compiled into a single executable (no
> seperate modules) and as more and more protocols, language
> enhancements, etc. are added, will the single executable ever get to
> the point where it's too large? Just keep getting bigger and bigger.
> At what point would it become too large and cumbersome?
I think that it is just temporare state. Remember Carl designed AmigaOS
and modularity and componentisation is his way to looking at how things
should work. I believe, that rebol is pretty well modularised under the
hood. So, separate components, pluggable in real-time will surely come,
once there is some important one, which would enlarde rebol.exe
significantly ... till then, however, - relax :-)
> 2) How are obsolete features/protocols being retired? e.g. if REBOL
> supports a protocol that no one uses enough anymore to justify it
> being in the executable, will they keep it in there indefinitely for
> backwards compatibility or are they removing/retiring those types of
> features with new versions?
Just one thing to remember - one thing is .exe file, and second
completly unrelated thing is - how does it unpack itself into memory.
Rebol/View is NOT started internally, untill some View related
functionality is called. So - it just sits and takes its place in
executable, not memory. The same could be probably said about network
protocols. And if not, they are pretty tiny.
You can use some tool/profiler available (IIRC DocKimbel did one, just
look and find it on his reb-site) to play with it. You can use function
'free (/Command only?), 'unset, or just assign something to none!
> 3) When I fire up REBOL it brings up the REBOL desktop. I assume the
> desktop is a REBOL script, but is this script imbedded into the
> executable itself? If so, what if you want to modify it? Shouldn't
> there just be some kind of default startup-script defined and the user
> can make that whatever they want without burdening the executable with
> a built-in script that they may not want to use anyways?
We can't modify it yet. I hope RT will a) separate it from exe in the
future b) provide its source-code c) provides easy way of how to
overload/replace it ...
> 4) I did a search on Dice.com and didn't find 1 job for REBOL.
> Hopefully their new licensing terms I read about in the archives of
> this mailing list will change that. More Java-like licensing where
> REBOL still controls the design but developers are allowed to use it
> freely for commercial purposes. REBOL would then make their money
> licensing REBOL and associated applications to larger corporations for
> commercial purposes.
Yes, licensing model ... We all complain to MS licensing, but to be
fair, I find selling features pretty common in other languages for free
(sound, shell and library), pretty limiting and one of factors of rebol
unsuccessfull adoption. Other's are free to have their own opinion, just
don't flame, please, or I will make even harder-to-swallow statements
regarding mySQL, Fast-CGI etc. modules ;-)
> FYI - REBOL/View is already pretty tiny, so for the fun of it I
> compressed it with the UPX executable packer and it shrank
> significantly more! It shrank from 503KB to 313KB! (38% smaller!)
> Here's the address for UPX: http://upx.sourceforge.net/
Yes, that's cool, isn't it? :-) Well, 1.44 is not limit for me. On my
new computer, I already have no floppy instaled anyway. I use USB Pen
device, 128MB and it mounts automatically from W98 to WXP, even Linux
can find it. It's just so cool - no more crappy floppies :-)
Cheers,
-pekr-
