Rebol Size

[Rodrigo Benenson]

www.rebol.com

Rebol offers a free (non-opensource) platform to devellop internet enabled
application.
It is a modern scripting language with objects, a huge list of base types
and a very very clean syntax. It is full multiplaftorm.
Rebol is able to manage 14 internet protocols (http, ftp, dns, finger,
whois, pop, smtp, etc...) , offer data storage and reading, is able to
manage various compression formats, various image file format (bmp, gif,
png, jpg, etc...) and has a very very easy to use graphic interface
construction dialect.
His syntax allow to devellop simple dialects to extend the language on some
specific application domains (example: there is a dialect for creating
plots).
As everything is internet enable is allow easy collaboration and
comunication between clients.

Everything until now can be rivalized by Python. My point is:

All of the above comes the 500 Kb Rebol/View distribution !!

(for the most common platforms)

To do the same thing in python I would need:

Python (>5 Mb)
Twisted (>5 Mb)
Imaging (>400Kb)
-------------------
More than 10 Mb

Ok, python probably is a little faster and is a programming language, not a
scripting one.

But how to explain such a difference ?


Rodrigo Benenson.

 

[Jarek Zgoda]

But how to explain such a difference ?

Freedom weights.

 

[Andrew Dalke]

Rodrigo Benenson:

Everything until now can be rivalized by Python. My point is:

All of the above comes the 500 Kb Rebol/View distribution !! ...
To do the same thing in python I would need: ...
More than 10 Mb

But how to explain such a difference ?

That 10MB includes many things not present in Rebol.
Eg, both Python and Twisted provide different types
of web servers (not sure about Rebol, but I think it's
client-oriented). Twisted also includes a web app
development system (Woven). What feature of PIL
exceed those of Rebol?

How small could you make a Python distribution and
still include the functionality you need? I would hazard
to say quite a bit.

Andrew
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Istvan Albert]

Rebol is not great or unique due of his features. It is cool because it is
truly deployable. Everyone can download 500 kb and start playing with tiny
scripts.

I think tiny is the key word here. As you point it out Rebol
seems to want to be a small, and simple language doing a little
bit of everything that can be quickly deployed and can run tiny
scripts anywhere. And if that is what you need don't fret about
it use Rebol. On the other hand, you might find that the
simplicity of the language greatly constrains what you can
do and the language does not scale up toward more complex,
not so tiny scripts.

Actually I'm develloping a collaborative editor using Python and Twisted.
But it is a shine to distribute it (10 Mb downloads, with dependencies,
scarry....).

As python do not compile machine language and Twisted is huge, it is very
difficult to distribute real word applications in python.

I'm not an expert in Twisted but I would guess that if you find
that Rebol can replace Twisted than you didn't even need Twisted
in the first place and you could have used Python just by itself.

Python supports a whole lot of internet protocols right out
of the box just as Rebol does. I'd be surprised if there was
a protocol in Rebol that would not have a corresponding simple
and very small python module

But, you are right, for people that do not have python there is no
way around downloading it.

Istvan.