Red is a new programming language derived from Rebol: http://www.red-lang.org/ Not available to the public yet, it seems, but they already have windows, mac and Linux variants up and running.
The lead dev claims to have been a Amiga and BeOS dev back in the days, and we used to have a Rebol port for BeOS, so this might be worth pursuing by someone with the required skills?
Syllable Desktop (which is quite similar to Haiku) already ported REBOL:
Hope that inspires !
Good question.
No reason at all, except that nobody seems interested in doing it. The lure of being involved in something NEW and SHINY might just do it. If Haiku does not get an injection of fresh software soon, whatās the point? A better and better OS with absolutely nothing to run on it?
Syllable ported nothingā¦ but really nothing.
It just the style of kaj, that tries to put ānothingā is a great package.
Itās just a slighty modivicated binary that run in syl. but just in terminal. That means no GUI. And i know all the stuff related to rebol&Syllable. And I know very well the current state of syllable and itās more than clear that rebol will NEVER have Rebol GUI.
Kaj is involed with syllable since 10 years, and he even didnt manage to learn c++ and to learn how to make an application with GUI.
Like he even admited, thatās not a secret.
Jonas was long time ago right, when he said that syllable wins nothing waiting for Rebol.
How many years past since Kaj was talking about rebol 3? About 4 or 5 years. And Rebol 3 is still in alpha stage. Great.
I dont know anymore the license of rebol, but it was proprietari when the last time i checked it.
There is just one big reason why kaj insists on rebol/red. He has more knowledge/experience with scripting.
All devs of syllable went away and most of them because of kaj.
I dont understand how you can bet on a dead horse. Even for a non-programmer it should be very clear that syl. is as good as dead. Thom (osnews) wrote that too in an article, for the ones that dont know.
Syllable has soon 3 years since the last release.
Their last ādevelopment buildā is more than 2 years old. Since 2 years syllable has not be compiled anymore. While Haiku is compiled everday.
The real improvements done on the core system in the last 2 years, are as good as ZERO. But really. Please go and look at the source-tree and you will be shocked. Two years with any kind of real improvements.
Even FreeDos has a lot more potential for the future than syllable.
[quote=Michel]Good question.
No reason at all, except that nobody seems interested in doing it. The lure of being involved in something NEW and SHINY might just do it. If Haiku does not get an injection of fresh software soon, whatās the point? A better and better OS with absolutely nothing to run on it?[/quote]
Injection with what? with scripts written in rebol/red language running in terminal?
You really missed the progress of haiku.
Cipri, I respect what you are doing with the PDF viewer. But go and have a look on Haikuware and view the new apps over, say, the last 180 days.
http://haikuware.com/repository-stats
Now isnāt that a depressing sight? Ported command-line compression apps which were already available. Dog-slow hobbyist apps written in yab (some of those would be mine). In fact, your Document Viewer is the ONLY major new app to show up there in the last 6 months IMHO. And letās face it, a hundred downloads? Is that really how small our community is?
Haiku itself may have made progress, although most of it it is under the hood. (Fire up Alpha 1 and alpha 3 and ask a newcomer to tell the difference!). But in terms of apps, we are standing still. In fact, we are moving backwards. More and more old BeOS apps that ran fine under A1 no longer work. Which is OK, except that they are not being replaced or updated.
I may be the only one to see this as a problem. But I cannot honestly tell my friends to install Haiku if they want to do anything except play around with Haiku. Itās been 10 years. It is not unreasonable to start asking āYes, but what can we DO with it?ā If we have any intention of expanding beyond those 100 people, we need an answer to that question.
2-3 years ago QT was supposed to be the promised land of new Haiku apps. That fizzled out quickly.
No, rebol scripts by themselves are not likely to solve this problem. Porting the API to Python and Lua will not, by itself, solve the problem. But every little bit helps. Every new possibility of writing apps makes Haiku attractive to a different set of enthusiasts.
yes, you are right. I just had the impression that you were thinking that we need rebol/red too.
The last time i checked rebol3 it was in a bad shape, and Red is in a worser shape. I think at this moment it even doesnt make sense to talk about them.
Yes, indeed we need applications, and i think itās very pitty, that haiku inc. didnt support the russian who ported qt, because it brings indeed benefits. As i understood qt 5 should be more portable, i hope we will get qt 5 too. For coding i even use an editor written in qt.
Itās true that on haikuware there are a lot of very small projects, and there is hardly someone try to make a more complete and useful application
On the other side, i even asked people on the forum what kind of native applications they would like to have, so that i have an ideea for later. I didnt get a good feedback.
The progess of Gallium3D gives me good hopes for a bright future. I cant await to see my chess game working in 3D with hw acceleration. 
It would be great to win at lotto a few millions and donate most of it to haiku, so that it makes a faster progress. Too bad the chances to win at lotto are so little
(IMHO) The problem is: WHICH are applications that we need?
Personally I believe that multimedia-content-creation apps would be the keystone, but seems that Iām the only one who thinks soā¦
So I think that the only way to follow is to bring many cross-platform libraries as possible.
For example - as already suggested - Juce seems interesting:
http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce.php
About Syllable: seems that theyāre more interested in Server 'cause itās more āprofitableāā¦
BTW there are many interesting projects around that seems dying: Syllable, SkyOS, etc.
I also agree that we need content creation apps. Like for instance a decent document editor, a video editor, and audio editor, a 3D scene creation tool.
None of these are really out of reach. We could start with ABIWord. We have the source code to the old BeOS UltraDV video editor. Maybe update BeAE or Bam Bam for the new media server. And also update Blender or POV.
It would be great to have an updated demo that could show off Haiku messaging on a new SMP CPU using mixed media.
sorry for necromancing this topic!
Lightworks is a NLE that is gona be open sourced this summer iāll look into the source code and see what we can do with it (specially how portable it will be). i think that will be a very good addition into Haiku ware.
AFAIK Lightworks will be no more open sourced, EditShare decided to switch to freewareā¦ funny āopen sourceā exploitation !
BTW Juce is from an ex-Lightworks developer !
Just wanted to add that Rebol itself will be open-sourced in the next few daysā¦
The time has come for REBOL to be released as open source. This is the only way I can see it regaining some degree of momentum and renewed interest ā not just within our REBOL community, but for many yet-to-be users who possess the curiosity or motivation to learn new and powerful programming concepts and techniques.
Hereās my proposal
The R3 source code will be released under GPL 2 (most likely - still open to discussion.)
The official source release distribution (rel-src) will be made available from the REBOL.com site.
Developmental sources (dev-src) will be available on GitHub (or a similar service.)
From time to time the dev-src will be reviewed, selected, debugged, polished, and integrated into rel-src releases.
A small group of REBOL Masters (maybe three for now) will be in charge of such rel-src review, selection, revising, debugging, integration etc. as well as develop or encourage the development of new features, ports to new platforms, optimizations, etc.
My role will be to advise and guide such decisions to keep REBOL consistent with its principles, and I will hold the final power of veto, in cases where that becomes necessary.
A few days turned into a few weeks, but itās coming. license is now Apache 2.0, probably much more suitable for Haiku than GPL. Details:
rebol somehow died, at least for me. After delaying R3 for aboutā¦ 5 years, itās really time to go on. And at the moment I see no reason to give RED a try.
Scripting languages like red, are born and died nearly every day. Who is stupid enough so spend his time on something, that is not yet clear, for how long it will live?
You are really a fool, if you think that āred/reboolā is the next big thing.
Mostly this rumos comes from the guy of syllable, who is not really able to write decent c++ code, so he was thinking, that for him it would be an advantage if syllable would be more scripting-orientend, because he is better at āscriptingā. But he totaly forgot that itās hard to find fools that are going to port it syllable, especially since the syllable api is in a very bad state. You can do what you want, try to write gui binding, but the result will be still a bad one, because the api of syllable has a lot of bugs and lacks a lot of features, and there is absolutely nobody who can fix it (since as good all devs left syllable).
So dear people, i guess itās not a good idea to continue with that senseless suggestions. When (and if) RED/Rebol will be the big success, then please come back, and it will be ported.
I know itās hard for you to accept it, since āsomeoneā from syllable told you a lot of great stories about rebol/red, but the fact is, that rebol is somehow like DEAD, like syllable is itself. If you dont accept that, you will continue loosing time with something that is going to be even more dead that itās already now. Better go for a walk, or go and feed that ducks, because itās more benefical than spending time for something that is dead or as good as dead.
Hmm, why so much anger? I didnāt even mention Syllable (I donāt know anything about it other than whatās on Wikipedia).
I was mentioning REBOL because somebody inquired about it and there are important news:
REBOL goes open source.
The source license will be Apache 2.0 and hosted on GitHub.
Therefore, if someone is interested in REBOL in combination with Haiku, why not mention it?
PS: By the way, if you mention REBOL R3 is 5 years late, the same could be argued about Haiku in a mean spirit. ā12 years old and only at Alpha4ā. I on other hand find it great that Alpha4 is released and hopefully a 1.0 release and ARM port is coming one day.
you didnt understand me. Haiku is not 12 years late, because haiku didnt say it would be finished 12 years ago.
R3 was awaited about many years ago to be finished.
Even the head developer of rebol announced something like: āin the next few weeks rebol3 will be releasedā, and then nothing came, itās about 2 years, when he saw rebol3 to be released (not the alphas).
If you see a project stagnating for so much time, then i can give you the good advice, to not waste your time anymore on it. Such projects, have very very little chance to stand up again, and perform. So why waste your time on something that has very little chance to be benefical? Better go and play lotto, there you have also little chances.
But yes, in fact you dont want to waste your time, otherwise you would start learning to programm and start porting rebol. No, you would like that other devs are stupid enought to waste their time on something that has very little chance. My advice: Dont put your hopes in finding a stupid developer, the chances are very little to find a stupid one, that is also able to do good work.
Or even better, go to the rebol guys, and try to convince them to try porting rebol to haiku. I know already the answer that they will give you, but I let you the joy of trying it out.
Someone asked āwhat can you do with Haiku?ā There are quite a few people who use an operating system only to run an internet browser. So, thatās a big āsomething to do.ā Iāve purposely converted to Haiku for almost all of my internet, although I must admit that Iām much more forgiving of WebPositive idiosyncracies than the average end-user might be. Once in a moon I have to drop back to FreeBSD to use flash, when I am visiting mandatory-flash-only sites, I think some continued effort to put the spit shine on WebPositive would create the best and most used application for Haiku. Sounds trite - but I think itās so. Someone else mentioned media creation tools. Iād look to see Inkscape, for instance ā¦ or gimp ā¦ but those are GTKed. In that frame of thought ā¦ the applications come more slowly on Haiku because of one of its strengths (a unified, small set of apis). Haiku apps must be created for Haiku in its own lingo. I keep telling myself that one of these days, Iām gonna do a worthwhile Haiku lingo app. Maybe Inkscape? LOL
Itās not to say that Haiku doesnāt have worthwhile apps. It does have worthwhile apps, such as cipriās PDF. Kudos go out to cipri.
āWouldnāt it be great?ā ā¦ I think a beer commercial just popped into my head. Anyway, wouldnāt it be great if all applications abstracted their GUIs? I havenāt looked much at the gimp code but Iād guess the GUI is tied into the toolkit like silli-putty. Why couldnāt all developers of applications be real smart and create nice GUI abstraction classes? Or the equivalent? In order for this idea to provide work-reducing benefits, there would be a common, well known intermediate api. Oh, here comes the Swedish bikini lady right now ā¦
Agree with Roland, many people work/play in browser tabs all day long.
Maybe a resurrected BeIA version of Haiku would make sense one day? Very fast booting, popular social media plug-ins, web browser, web mail and a media playerā¦HaikuIA