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R3 Beta availability

 [1/11] from: tmoeller::fastmail::fm at: 4-Sep-2007 16:00


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

 [2/11] from: greg:schofield:iinet:au at: 4-Sep-2007 22:04


For what it is worth, I am in the same position as Thorsten. I know everybody is busy and a status report is the least of anybody's worries, still it would be nice. Greg Schofield Perth Australia --- Message Received --- From: Thorsten Moeller <tmoeller-fastmail.fm> To: Rebol Mailinglist <rebolist-rebol.com> Reply-To: rebolist-rebol.com Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:00:17 +0200

 [3/11] from: chd::1staccess::ca at: 4-Sep-2007 10:15

Rebol3


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

 [4/11] from: brian:wisti:gm:ail at: 4-Sep-2007 10:26

Re: R3 Beta availability


As far as I can tell, the team is still deep in debugging the alpha. A beta is due soon, given an as--yet-undefined value for "soon". I'm rather impatient as well. Then again, not having a R3 beta to play with means that I have had more time to work on that Python project I'd been ignoring. Kind Regards, Brian Wisti http://coolnamehere.com/ On 9/4/07, greg.schofield-iinet.net.au <greg.schofield-iinet.net.au> wrote:

 [5/11] from: henrik:webz:dk at: 4-Sep-2007 19:54


On 04/09/2007, at 19.26, Brian Wisti wrote:
> As far as I can tell, the team is still deep in debugging the > alpha. A beta > is due soon, given an as--yet-undefined value for "soon". I'm rather > impatient as well. Then again, not having a R3 beta to play with > means that > I have had more time to work on that Python project I'd been ignoring.
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

 [6/11] from: rgaither::triad::rr::com at: 4-Sep-2007 20:25


Hi Henrik,
> 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
<<quoted lines omitted: 3>>
> probably count as some time before 2008, but definitely not this or > next week. :-) When it will be released is entirely up to Carl.
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.
> Some stats: > The 70th alpha release was put out yesterday, right now at a pace of
<<quoted lines omitted: 4>>
> inactive people, busy with other work. > VID3 is currently consisting of roughly 128 kb source code.
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.

 [7/11] from: btiffin:rogers at: 4-Sep-2007 23:33


Rod; I've been hinting that snippets get posted more frequently. It's been a long wait. When the Beta does roll, there will be a fair whack of documentation as well. One of the best places so far for what is on the horizon came with the DevCon videos. If you haven't (and can afford an hour or two) check out http://www.sahores-conseil.com/?q=node/2 In particular the Carl vids. And; GNU/Linux is getting attention and is definitely an ongoing concern. I don't pay close enough attention to OSX posting to know it's status, but I know it is not going to be left behind. And thanks for the extra ammo in mentioning that Windows is not the end-all-be-all. (I'm a Debian fanboy). Again, it's on the plate, but extra bullet points always help with presentations. Cheers, Brian On Tuesday 04 September 2007 20:25, Rod Gaither wrote:

 [8/11] from: tmoeller::fastmail::fm at: 5-Sep-2007 9:38


Thanks to all, sharing some insights in the current development of R3 with us. Thorsten On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:00:17 +0200, "Thorsten Moeller" <tmoeller-fastmail.fm> said:
> Hi, > has anybody heard something about the start date for the open Beta of
<<quoted lines omitted: 5>>
> Thanks > Thorsten
-- http://www.fastmail.fm - And now for something completely different=85

 [9/11] from: henrik::webz::dk at: 5-Sep-2007 16:31


On 05/09/2007, at 2.25, Rod Gaither wrote:
> Hi Henrik, >> Giving out dates was a mistake in the first place and they were not
<<quoted lines omitted: 5>>
>> next week. :-) When it will be released is entirely up to Carl. > Is there any place were these "features" are listed?
Mmm... no. :-)
> 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 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 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.
>> map [a b] [1 2 3 4 5 6] [a + b]
== [3 7 11]
>> map [a b] [1 2 3 4 5 6] [reduce [a b]]
== [[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.
> 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
<<quoted lines omitted: 4>>
> to support the other platforms - over feature y or z or beta bug > fixes.
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

 [10/11] 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
<<quoted lines omitted: 3>>
> 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
<<quoted lines omitted: 4>>
> 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.

 [11/11] from: btiffin:rogers at: 13-Sep-2007 13:37


Hi listers, For the curious rebols that don't hang out on Altme, a history of the Alpha releases has been posted to the REBOLWeek weblog. http://rebolweek.blogspot.com Please note; R3 is still in ALPHA. This blog post is just to help ease some of the curiosity...well...and as a teaser :) Cheers, Brian On Tuesday 04 September 2007 10:00, Thorsten Moeller wrote:

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