rebol alternative [was Re: discussion about a possible enterprise edition of Lua with support services]

[Martin Spernau <martin@...>]

I'd just like to add that the Lua platform aready has all the parts 
needed to put together a good alternative to REBOL, and that all of them 
are freely availeable.
Yindo was/is a nice demonstration that such is possible (with very 
impressive results), but the cöosed nature of it, and it being based on 
Lua 3.2 made it less appealing to the community I think.

Ray Garcia wrote:

> - I beleive the Lua is very close to being a Rebol alternative if you
> leverage the work that was done with the Yindo project.  They have 
> nearly all of the support that Rebol has except XML, database, Gui 
> widgets, SOAP Client/Server.  Yindo is just as fast as Rebol yet much 
> more open and easy to code.  You already have a CGI version of Lua.  I 
> just found out that the Yindo project is coming to an end this year 
> and will not be supported.

Building an alternative for REBOL is exactly what hooked me to Lua in 
the first place. I'm currently putting together a personal project which 
 (for me) even surpasses REBOL /Core, by 'simply' putting together 
various add-on modules from the Lua community.  It has Sockets, XML 
(expat), SQL  built-in (no need for external DB-engine thanks to 
SQLite), and recently zlib (gz) support.
I haven't yet decided on a GUI lib, and I'm still struggeling with regex 
support (I#d love to have PCRE eventually).
All of this was possible w/o me being very good at C et al, just by 
using what the community put out (a very big thanks to all authors!).

The point being that actually _all_ the needed parts are there or can be 
easily added, but it can be quite some hassle to collect and put 
everything together, altho the actual problem in my case arise more from 
compiling on Win32, which not all modules support directly.

just my 2c
-Martin