View for CE or Zaurus revisited.

No, but I've got /view working on a two disk (1.4Mb) linux distro based on Tiny-X w/o any issues. What kind of X11 support does the Zaurus provide? Regards, Ashley

None. It's based on Qt Embedded. StrongARM platform. Brian

Memory and speed requirements. View typically uses at least 4 to 5 mb of memory for every instance, and that's before you take any data or scripts into account. Also, /Core on CE is dog slow (at least on ARM, I haven't tested others). Both of these problems together make REBOL impractical for any embedded systems platform, even a generous one like CE. Fixing the memory problem would require reorganizing REBOL to share more resources between instances. The speed issue would require a lot of profiling and hand optimization. Both together might require almost a separate code base, just for embedded platforms; at least some code could be shared between CE and Linux, though. All this would require more time and resources than REBOL can allocate for this kind of thing for now - closed source, remember. Personally I would appreciate /Base/Pro for CE. The memory requirements would be less and I could have the libraries already in ROM do the grunt work. Even command line param support or clipboard support for the existing /Core would make REBOL more useful on CE right now. I can dream, right? Brian Hawley

Yes, very strange thing. Carl designed AmigaOS - modular concept, fast enough even on 7MHz machine, yet View is sometimes laggy even on pretty decent machine. Rebol is very good concept, but inability to compile (or overall lack of free time of RT to add domain specific dialect virtual machines) does not provide us with general enough language - we are magnitude slower than C or even Java on general math and GUI stuff (general primitives, bitmap handling). Maybe we should wait for next gen devices? The question is - is e.g. iPAQ (or other) PDA, running XScale at 400 MHz, 64 MB fast enough? If so, maybe RT could think about their "next thing" as mobile devices support - Symbian + PocketPC + Linux? I think that Ed said it very well! On nearly month basis we see various products popping up here or there, which could be done using rebol ... nearly done. We should stop playing the lowest common denominator game, that is plain silly. In the long term, we are killing rebol oportunities in certain areas. We need more open aproach and no that pseudo efficiency game - not adding usefull features just because they would add to executable size - the rest of world does not care - the rest of world will not judge rebol upon its executable size, but what can be done using rebol - and that is the only thing we should keep in mind (and that does not mean we should forgot efficiency) ...

maybe few things could be done even today ... during czech rebol workshop Ladislav told us few hints that could possibly help (GC and memory allocation related), but only Carl could answer those ones ...

Who knows? The last dev. update is dated November, we have yet to see, what RT plans for 2K3. So far we know that RT is working on OsX ports, SDK is still beta ... I just hope RT will not be silent half a year ... So, in the meantime, we can forget multimedia and other cute things Rebol could shine in, and code few boring enterprise apps, can't we? :-) There is always something usefull to do with Rebol ... -pekr-

...

Hi Petr, Since I can't embed REBOL into C programs and use it directly, I've found that using it as a compiler for custom virtual machines works pretty well. This may be better than using REBOL directly as there is no run-time overhead or speed penalty of a general purpose language. The only downside is that generating binary values from REBOL is a little messy (such as the code required to convert decimal values to IEEE floats). The article you found on linking C and Python to build GUIs on MacOSX is a good example of what would be possible if programmers were allowed to 'get down and dirty' with REBOL. -Karl

Perhaps this could help:

== #{85EB6140}

== #{3D0AD7A3703D0C40} --- Ciao Romano

command

It works fine for me in View 1.2.1.3.1 (21-Jun-2001) -- that's a slightly out-of-date version of View (not View/Pro, just View). It doesn't work in the latest Core beta 2.5.0.3.1 (23-Mar-2001) -- though the download page at rebol.com says a new version is available soon Sunanda

command

It is also in standard View. --- Ciao Romano