No one wants to write plugins for a BxP browser-by-platform matrix—and the powers that be killed off Flash. Yet some of those same powers (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google) collaborated to deliver a near-native-speed compilation target: WebAssembly. You might think Rebol would be one of the last languages to target a bloated browser…but it’s actually able to be one of the early adopters of WASM—due to low dependencies and a versatile model. Brian will explain the how and why of this new target (which he believes has the potential to be the most viable Rebol environment to date).
A brief overview of events at Atronix since the last Rebol conference in 2013 including the introduction of ZOE, new ASCADA modules, Rebol interpreter development, our acquisition by MHS (Material Handling Systems) and a look at our software roadmap.
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Ren-C.
An overview of the web-based UI builder and the practicalities of developing for Rebol-in-the-browser.
Examining the role of dialecting (DSL creation) to overcome challenges in managing content across distributed platforms.
Some examples of the application of Rebol dialects in the wild. Examples included are a softball scorecard generator, a Last Man Standing tracker, an ImpressJS demo infused with StyleTalk. Mention too of Lest, PDF Maker and the Rebol Desktop.
A fast paced introduction to ZOE that will include a demo highlighting a typical customer project as well as show how application development works in the ZOE environment.
Part I • the joys and sufferings of programming by mobile phone.
Part II • building and using Rebol Server, an Android app with client-server architecture, that uses Rebol on both sides.
This exercise grew out of my desire, once Rebol was open-sourced, for a formal description of exactly what comprised the Rebol language. Initially I had hoped for a BNF, but that soon morphed into using a parse expression grammar, both for readability and for availability via the PARSE dialect. Things got complicated when I realised that I couldn’t force myself to faithfully represent all the bugs in the source, however, so there is a lot of effort herein towards addressing (and carefully commenting about) enough of those to make the result more consistent and at least somewhat sane. The result is unique, but it is my hope that it remains a reasonably useful example of a Rebol-like language.
With the ubiquity of C libraries, it’s hard to pretend that we can ignore them and rewrite everything in Rebol. Working with them is the only practical solution. Writing an extension wrapping the C functions is one way, but it requires understanding the Rebol 3 extension interface and a C development environment. Another way is building an FFI (Foreign Function Interface) for Rebol 3 to access the functions directly from within Rebol. The goal of this work was to make every C function be callable from within Rebol, which includes calling functions by name or by pointer, passing in arguments of different types: primitives, structs, pointers, or even callback functions, and accessing the exported data.
Rebol’s origin from the mind of an electrical engineer fell into the hands of another, equally nerdy EE. Brian will take you through the data structures and bit fiddling that make it all work, tracing through the code itself. (If you don’t consider yourself a geek, maybe sit this one out, because it’s going to be deep.)
Brian discusses the 60” tall banner with a FizzBuzz solution on it used as the backdrop for Rebol [2019], and how it ties into his vision of what it means to make Rebol “timeless”.