Purpose of this Rebol fork is to push the origial Carl's source to be usable at least like Rebol 2, but keep the source code clean and project easy to build. Use CHANGES.md file to see changes made in this branch.
Preferred way for issue reporting is using dedicated issue repository. It's a fork of the original Rebol issue repository, which was filled with issues from CureCode issue tracker, which was used before Rebol was on Github. I'm not using the original Rebol issue repository, because I was not allowed to even add labels to my own issues. It was later moved under Metaeducation account and is used for Ren-C development anyway.
There are available precompiled binaries for each release. So far there are 3 main build types:
- Base is a build with minimal additions (not much useful)
- Core includes a little bit more stuff than the Base
- Bulk is a build which includes almost everything.
And there is also the Host exe and the DLL - the Rebol library is separated and used from the host application. That is from times before open sourcing Rebol completely. Only host part was open and the library was still closed. In theory you can have one library and many tiny host applications. I'm building just the Core on Windows so far to see, if it is still working.
For macOS users on 10.15+, downloaded precompiled applications (and or extensions bellow) may not work properly unless the quarantine setting is removed:
xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file
It is possible to extend Rebol functionality using external modules (native and or written in Rebol itself). Here are links to some of them:
- Rebol/BCM2835 - Broadcom BCM 2835 chip extension (for GPIO on RaspberryPI)
- Rebol/Blend2D - Drawing dialect using Blend2D as a high performance 2D vector graphics engine
- Rebol/Easing - Collection of easing functions
- Rebol/Godot - Extractor of Godot's
.pckfiles - Rebol/HTTPd - Webserver scheme
- Rebol/IRC - Internet Relay Chat scheme
- Rebol/MathPresso - Mathematical Expression Parser And JIT Compiler
- Rebol/Names - Random names generator scheme
- Rebol/OpenCV - Computer Vision Library
- Rebol/SQLite - SQL database engine
- Rebol/Triangulate - Two-Dimensional Quality Mesh Generator and Delaunay Triangulator
It should be noted that on macOS it may be required to resign downloaded native extensions using command like:
codesign --sign "5D94...EED5" -f -o runtime /path/to/extension.rebx
To find a signing identity, use: security find-identity
Rebol itself is not a compiler (like Red language) but just an interpreter. You must have some compiler of your choice to compile Rebol. For Windows you may want to use any of these:
Once you have any of these compilers, you must use Siskin Builder tool, which is actually a customised Rebol needed to preprocess it's own sources. It deserves own documentation as it's not mean to be used only to build Rebol. Meanwhile you may take a look at the source of the Github workflow file for building all Rebol variants used in the releases.
For a local use, you just do: siskin <SOME-NEST-FILE>, which starts CLI in an interactive mode.
The Siskin builder itself may be used as an example, how to build a custom utility based on Rebol sources.
The specification is defined in this *.nest file, where important is CUSTOM_STARTUP define and some files, which should be included and some optional Rebol parts if needed.
If you are looking for other Rebol like languages, you may want to check also:
- Arturo language written in Nim
- Boron language written in C
- Red language written in Red bootstrapped from Rebol2
- Red.js web runtime for Red written in Haxe
- Ren-C another living Rebol3 fork
- Rye language written in Go
- Topaz experimental Rebol like language being compiled to JS
- World language written in C
There is also Shinxin's fork, which I was initially using for chery-picking, as it contains modifications from Atronix and Saphirion. But its use is now limited as it depends on non-public modules and also there is not much life visible recently.