R3 Beta availability

Hi, has anybody heard something about the start date for the open Beta of R3. Shouldn't it be released by now?? I am specially interedted in using Rebol as a Windows Service and Mutithreading. Does anybody knows if this features will be available in the Beta-Versions?? Thanks Thorsten ------ Thorsten Moeller Schwalbenweg 5a 22453 Hamburg Fon: 040 / 589 17 980 Mobil: 0171 / 490 33 59 Mail: tmoeller-fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love email again

Yeah me too. I have been waiting since May and I don't mind waiting longer, if things are moving along well and a beta could be released soon. ~chris Canada

Giving out dates was a mistake in the first place and they were not realistic. Things are moving forward, but there's still a lot to do in practically all areas of R3. The difficult part is testing the massive array of features that R3 consists of. I don't know yet when the alpha will be ready for release as beta, but "soon" should probably count as some time before 2008, but definitely not this or next week. :-) When it will be released is entirely up to Carl. Some stats: The 70th alpha release was put out yesterday, right now at a pace of about 1 release per day. There are 294 bug reports in the bug tracker of which, probably 75% are solved. There are at least 14 people working actively on R3, with 7-8 more inactive people, busy with other work. VID3 is currently consisting of roughly 128 kb source code. -- Regards, Henrik Mikael Kristensen R3 Team

Is there any place were these "features" are listed? 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. I would hope there is an organized set of goals (goals <> generic architecture drawings) somewhere and specific features designed to meet those goals worked up with estimates of how close to complete each one is... Okay, that is being a bit idealistic but hey even just a list of features would be good, perhaps grouped by expected in beta, release, r3.1, etc. :-) I also want to make a plea for releasing the beta for the three major platforms - linux and mac os x as well as windows. Some of us will be forced to wait even longer just because we won't put a windows box on our network. Though in fairness to those with windows I'm not asking you to hold up the beta on them because of the other platforms, just keep in mind one user voice thinks it is a priority to support the other platforms - over feature y or z or beta bug fixes.

I want you to know that those of us waiting really appreciate your status updates, even simple ones like this are nice to hear. Thanks, Rod.

-- http://www.fastmail.fm - And now for something completely different=85

Mmm... no. :-)

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 can't post a complete list, but there are particularly operations on blocks that are much simpler than in R2 and very fast. Here's just one of them: MAP - Evaluates a block for each value(s) in a series and returns them as a block.

== [3 7 11]

== [[1 2][3 4][5 6]] It does more than that, but already just this is very powerful. Other block operations like FOREACH and REPEAT have extended and changed functionality to speed them up and allowing you to change the content of the block as it's being traversed by the function. Doing this in R2, requires knowledge on PARSE and is more difficult to write. There is a new parser called DELECT, which is a different way to create dialects. It's suited for streamlining out-of-order input words and is used in the new VID3. 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. 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.

We are dying for a Linux and OSX version of R3 too. Many in the R3 team don't have Windows as primary OS and must settle for Wine, which 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. :-) -- Regards, Henrik Mikael Kristensen

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.

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.

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.

Also good news as I'm not going the wine route either, just not worth the time to me. Thanks again, Rod.