Guest post by Version 0.2.5 of the new Red/System programming language has been released, after it celebrated its first birthday at the third Red Developers Conference. Bindings with the standard C library, cURL, SDL and SQLite that were developed over the past year are now properly supported on Syllable Desktop. Conference videos introduce Red/System and the bindings. Earlier, new floating point support was released (Mandelbrot screenshot; demo source, see the .reds file).
Red now has support for proper initialisation of the standard C library, for Red/System programs or other libraries that use it. This has been developed in collaboration between the Red and Syllable projects. Other platforms got by without it so far, but on Syllable Desktop, Red/System programs that use the C library required a workaround until now.
The bindings were written by the Syllable project and contributed to the Red project. The goal is to make sure that native and cross-platform Red programs will be able to run on Syllable Desktop. The bindings work on Syllable Desktop, Syllable Server, and other platforms. Red/System is currently implemented in REBOL2. Therefore, the Red/System compiler doesn’t run on Syllable Desktop yet, but Syllable programs can be cross-compiled from other systems. The bindings were developed on Syllable Server.
A new Syllable Desktop development version was released to support Red. It is required for the SQLite database binding (demo source). The new Syllable version fixes support for recent SQLite versions and includes the latest one. The other bindings also work on older versions of Syllable.
Here is a (Fibonacci micro-benchmark example). Like the Mandelbrot example, it is written to compare eight languages, mostly from the REBOL family. This screenshot shows Red/System reading a web page, through the cURL networking library (demo source). Here is an example of a simple paint program running on the SDL multimedia library (demos source). Finally, here is an example of playing audio through SDL.
I remember playing with Rebol when it was first being developed… it was an interesting language. I hadn’t realized it caught on in the web/scripting dev world.
ANyway, I wish the RED people luck!
Not enough curly braces…
Now do something interesting with those bindings. Otherwise, give up.
Like this?
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67G8eTGTkVs&list=PL3926D5E4DBD8B360&… ]
Maybe screen capture would have worked better:-)
Perhaps, but this is not a presentation video, but a recording of a workshop during a conference. The main goal is to present the computer screen to the audience. And we must do it with all the diverse laptops that the speakers bring, so we can’t rely on software that needs to be installed.
Just want to say, I think it is great what the syllable team is doing. From the comments I gather you have a difficult job keeping everyone happy. The zeitgeist in the comment thread was not that good. Is unfortunate because the syllable is of the few teams that actually contribute articles.
All the best.
Perhaps you can specify, what is great that syllable team (?) is doing?
And who is part of the syllable team? People you see on wikipedia as “syllable devs” are already working at pyro-os, and the others are mostly non-active related to syllable.
So perhaps that’s a great opportunity for kaj to start updating the wikipedia pages, so that it reflects the reality better.
… and to make you finally happy, after all those years of constant ranting towards Kaj and “scripting languages” – LOL 🙂
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a shop window for projects to present themselves. We are not responsible for it and we are not even allowed to edit our Syllable page, because we are stakeholders. I only edit it to correct indisputable facts, such as broken links.
Wikipedia users who are discontent with the info should correct it, so that would be you.
What’s up with that Pyro-OS? I’ve tried to find information about it, but there seems to be preciously little. I only know it is a Syllable fork, that the split (apparently) was not very friendly, and that the devs want to emit as little CO2 as possible.
Thanks, feedback like this is important to keep our spirits up. We appreciate it.
I’m sorry, you missed the implied [with Syllable].
You missed the article text that these bindings are developed on Syllable Server.
On Linux, you mean?
Something useful has been done with Syllable, it’s been forked.
See:
http://opensourcedays.org/2012/node/93
and
http://www.pyro-os.org
We don’t have enough content on the website yet, but something’s been & continuing to be done.
Cool, you should have done that four years ago. 🙂
Yes, I guess you are happy now, hoping that like that syllable can finally improve, by leting dee and the others work/develop…. and then port it back to syllable. Too bad they let you wait 4 years 🙂
I guess you also missed the paragraph in the article that a new Syllable Desktop development version was released a month ago.
The development build you are referring was not built from cvs code, more looks like a custom old 0.6.7 dev build. Why? Kernel is not from CVS, and the last change that greatly effected it was 23 month ago, very stupid, “renaming bin to programs”, there is no path like /boot/system/programs/init in this release, it would fail booting if kernel was from cvs. If soundblaster works in this version this is probably a custom 0.6.6, oss port was updated but driver wasn’t.
There are both binary problems and source problems to fix to get a new Syllable release out, so I decided to speed up the process by fixing the last binary Syllable development build. There are a lot of fixes and additions on top of it, though. This is also necessary to be able to build a fully updated new toolchain.
The last release is nearly 3 years ago, I hope that at least you manage to bring out a new release in not longer than 5 years since the last release.
Good luck and I hope in the remaining 2 years you manage to build a working syllable cleanly from source.
And please dont forget to add some major features like new wallpapers and new icons.
Edited 2012-03-17 11:55 UTC
Four years ago I was recuperating from Iraq & dual surgeries on each ankle. Besides, I’m not the one who created the fork, I just happened to join.
Finally a good news related to syllable.
I guess you noticed that haiku is going (hopefully soon) to get gallium3d working, i hope you can borrow something from them
.
I think it will be very difficult for you, because syllable has a really very incomplete api.
In many aspect haiku and syllable are quite similar, that’s why i still dont understand why you didnt take haiku-gcc4 and build on top of that.
I’m really happy to see hope for new and real development and not “scripting languages” in very early development status.
my best wishes for you and pyro.
I know, I’ve been working on doing so for BOTH Pyro & Haiku. I’m trying to figure out how to use the pipe drivers without needing DRI/DRM. It’s painfully obvious that DRI/DRM don’t make sense for OS’s like ours, we aren’t working with the same core principles that *nix derivatives work with.
It’s simple, really. Currently, OSes like ours aren’t on anyone’s radar. The open sourced *nix clones have become successful & virtually slammed the door behind them. In order for OSes like ours to succeed, we must build a common community much like the overall *nix community that’s shared by Linux, BSD, MacOS X, & all of the proprietary *nix systems. The only successful way forward is for Haiku, Pyro, & Syllable to create a larger overall community of cooperation. I first realized that this was necessary a few years ago & my original idea called for four main OSes – the three that I’ve already named & SkyOS. Unfortunately, SkyOS didn’t make it. Just as unfortunate, it seems as though major development on Syllable (Desktop) itself has slowed down even more. I was hoping that they’d be able to work through their manpower problems & focus on getting Desktop back on track. Perhaps that’ll still happen.
There’s still time for development on Syllable. A new group of developers could always join & help push things along. Regardless, in order for any of us to be successful, there needs to be more of us. More of our style of OS, more developers, & more users. If Syllable fails, then that weakens all of us. However, I had to move forward on things that I thought were necessary, so I joined a group that would allow that to happen.
Thanks. May we all prosper!
Not to put you off, but the only reason UNIX clones become successful was that many companies saw a way out to get off commercial UNIX systems, while preserving their investments, thus they allowed some of their employees to invest on getting them better.
I don’t believe besides Windows and UNIX compatible systems, any other system will get successful.
It just the way it is, sadly.
This being OSNews, I wish you all the luck for your project.
I hope the development process will be OPEN and not closed as it is in Syllable.
I assure you, that is our intentions!
That’s the plan, but it won’t really matter if developers don’t join our team. So, I hope this is an expression of interest in donating your time towards development.
I will be happy to contribute, one or two lines of code, maybe more.
look at that video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDd5rdNPCg0
now i would love to see the same but for syllable
)
Where’s the ISO and what is the state of 64-bit builds?
We hope the release will be ready within the next week or so. 32bit only…
I believe this is the first time when I realized how indecent a representation of Mandelbrot set ( http://web.syllable.org/images/screenshots/Desktop/0.6.7/Red-C-libr… ) can be
(I guess thanks to “shading” – or lack of it – used, and/or a bit unorthodox orientation, you somehow made it’s bottom reminiscent of, well, bottoms 
)
Kaj,
With the RED – GTK binding have you soften your stance on GTK coming to desktop. ( And no I am not meaning to rehash discussions about cairo being on Syllable with the Pyro guys when I used to follow the Syllable mailing lists civil answers from all would be appreciated)
I am curious because now that you have it (a GTK binding) will it be moving to desktop.
I also notice in Nenad tweets enlightenment with Red
http://twitter.com/#!/red_lang
http://web.syllable.org/images/screenshots/Workstation/0.4/Evas-exa…
I have also been following Haiku mailing list there is a healthy discussion at the moment of maybe making QT a native api over the Haiku kernel. I don’t think it will go ahead but you never know. It’s an interesting idea thou making QT basically a native OS rather then an add on to Linux.
What are your thoughts for Syllable for the future.
Improve the current API
Move more to a GTK base with RED and Syllable
Move Syllable move to Red – enlightenment based api
I wish everybody the best
Pyro, Syllable and Haiku
Red and Syllable overlap, but they’re not the same project. Some things I do for Red are hard to bring to Syllable. However, it has always been my goal to bring the Syllable and REBOL lines together, so yes, I would like to get more of Red’s abilities to work on Syllable Desktop. To make that easier, I slice it into smaller steps by first developing them on Syllable Server.
I am indeed looking into Enlightenment and GTK+, but as of yet, they’re not ported to Syllable Desktop. Qt is still not very useful to us in this context, because C++ interfaces are hard and inefficient to bind to any other language. Not many toolkits written in C remain, so GTK+ and Enlightenment are the natural ones to bind to Red (or any other non-C++ language).
Unfortunately, GTK+ and Qt are still extremely bloated, and they’re not designed for the Syllable architecture, so our misgivings about them remain in that respect. As I hope you remember, we have always said we don’t object to anyone porting them, but we don’t have the time to do it ourselves, and we won’t suddenly start liking them. Then again, despite much talk, nobody actually ported them, so we may have to do it ourselves eventually. Despite even more talk, nobody wrote many native Syllable programs, either, so we do have to look into other ways to get applications, even if they don’t fit the Syllable architecture perfectly.