What can we expect in REBOL? Look at some dates: 6-4-2001 REBOL/View 1.0 24-5-2001REBOL/View 1.1 (mostly bugfixes) 21-6-2001 REBOL/View 1.2.1 (bugfixes + MacOS version) 10-6-2005 REBOL/View 1.3 (AGG integration)
So it took four years for new View version - and the most interesting part of the new View - AGG - is done outside REBOL Technologies. CORE part was enhanced too, but still...four years? So with this tempo we can expect some decent sound support in year 2009, 3D graphic in 2013... I hope I'm wrong REBolek On 7/20/05, Petr Krenzelok <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >=20 > Henri Morlaye napsal(a): >=20 > >Hello, > >Are there any plan to improve the multimedia capabilities of Rebol ? ( > >audio and video ) ? > >I think Videolan would be a good start, stripped down to an audio > >codec and a video codec it should be quite light and very portable. > >Plus as Rebol is a messaging language, Videolan is a messaging > >audio-video software, there is eveything built-in for broadcast, > >multicast... > > > >Henri > > > > > The question is - what do we consider being "multimedia". OK, I will > provide you with what was though/said in the past, but sadly never > happened. Maybe you do not know, that originally, REBOL was called LAVA > (Language for Audio and Video Applications). RT changed its name > according to some suggestions, as LAVA was too close to JAVA (today LAVA > is some other language ...) And sadly - it is good it changed its name, > as REBOL is far from being media friendly. >=20 > Such discussions do appear here periodically. Carl once replied here, > that his second name is multimedia and that he would too wish Rebol > being more media friendly. Some folks here claim, that you can e.g. > animate gfx object to move across screen. Rebol is said to use > double-buffering internally, but - try that. I buy a beer to anyone, who > shows me fast and SMOOTH moving gfx objects using Rebol. And if you > think that your stuff is smooth, download and run Scala Multimedia to > actually see, what do I mean by smoothness ;-) (some folks here in our > company think that PowerPoint provides you with smooth animations :-) >=20 > So - there was (and hopefully is) some willingness to change the > situation. What things were talked about? Carl once mentioned, that he > could provide us View plug-ins, so that ppl could write effect > extension, faster blitting routines or something like that. More > granular event system was mentioned too. But years passed by and nothing > happened in that regard. View 1.3 still contains "old" non async core, > not to mention things like multitasking, proper timers available even > for Core (not View only using face/rate trick). >=20 > But we have got something - at least we have AGG integrated for vectors, > which is really cool library. Some recent version of AGG offers also > compositing engine. Maybe it would be wise if RT would switch View > compositing to AGG too - it would probably make sense. >=20 > So - what's left for sound for e.g.? We found rather interesting > library, called fmod. It is not completly free, but maybe worth > integration. But - there are other things we could want to integrate > into Rebol - e.g. BitStream font engine. The thing is - where is the > boundary, where do we want Rebol to end? We need to keep cross-platform > compatibility, we want to keep it small. My opinion was clear - Rebol > should become kind of OS - tasking, general VM and proper > componentisation. Core.exe, View.exe, Command.exe, Whatever.exe is not > good for anyone imo. We would not probably tolerate View.exe becoming > 300KB larger by adding e.g. good sound library, but if things would be > properly componentised - main kernel would be kept small and I would > easily tolerate modules for sound, or even specialised ones. Some folks > tend to disagree and fear so called "dll hell" effect, that someone > missing certain component/module would be unable to run it. I say - > someone not having /Command module will not be able to use .e.g ODBC > call, so what is the difference? >=20 > The question is, if RT is ready for such radical change in aproach. > Currently REBOL is cool language technology, but I would not call it > probably call it a "system", unless it is componentised, modularised (in > a well thought out manner of course :-) and extensible ... >=20 > Cheers, > -pekr- >=20 >=20 >=20 > -- > To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to > lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject. >=20 >=20 --=20 / Boleslav Brezovsky http://krutek.info \ -- To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.
