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Comment by oldes | Hacker News Reader

The only fiasco with Rebol3, as I see it, is that everybody was asking for the language to be open-sourced, and when it finally happened, almost nobody was willing to take on the responsibility of maintaining it once Carl left, and almost the entire community disappeared - many to the Red camp.

Btw, Rebol is still being developed, without the masses noticing it.

https://rebol.tech/ https://github.com/Oldes/Rebol3/releases

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i suspect the community disappeared and moved to red already before rebol3 opened its license.

but if rebol is still being developed then someone (evidently that's you) eventually did take on the responsibility of maintaining it.

i have no clue here. i even only know about red because i met nenad in china. otherwise this whole ecosystem would not be on my radar)

so tell me, what motivated you to pick up rebol3, how does it differ from red and from rebol2 (the repo mentions making rebol3 as usable as rebol2 which implies that as released it was less usable. why did that happen? they could not open everything?)

one difference i see right away is that red is written in red/rebol whereas the original rebol is written in C. being selfhosting is a major feature for a language in my opinion.

As I understand it, there were some investments involved in the development of Rebol2, so it was not possible to release its code. Instead, Carl started Rebol3 as a rewrite. It was first divided into a closed Core library and an open-sourced Host part. Later, both parts were open-sourced, and Carl left.

Rebol3 was always considered an alpha version. In my fork, I've fixed hundreds of bugs and missing features.

And my motivation? I've been using Rebol since its early days. I used it successfully as a scripting language when producing several games. And since I don't make games anymore, I wanted to give something back to this abandoned language, whenever I have the time.

I was also involved in Red (and still follow its development), but for multiple reasons I decided it was better to work alone on the invisible Rebol.

that's awesome. how would you compare rebol3 with red? are there any syntactical differences? or just whats in the libraries? or the architecture, capabilities? as far as i can tell the main difference seems to be that rebol3 is written in C while red is written in rebol2/red itself.

Yes. R3 is written in C and Rebol. Red is so far using Rebol2 to be compiled and Red for mezzanine code.

Main difference is that there is a GUI available in Red. That is not available in R3 yet (at least not in my version). There was a GUI in the Saphirion fork, but it is abandoned for years and I didn't wanted to use it. I would like to provide GUI in the future. Probably as a native extension.

The code is almost same.. although there may be differencies in some function refinements or other details.

Even when Red is compiled to the assembly, it is still slower than interpreted R3 code, because of lack of optimizations. As it depends on its own compiler is also the reason, why there still isn't support fot 64bit arch. To write own compiler is a big task indeed.

And then R3 and Red differs in the number of developers. There may be 3 or 4 people (2 active) working on Red while R3 is worked just by me so far.

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