September 20, 2011

Red at Software Freedom Day 2011

I have been invited at the Software Freedom Day 2011 (September 14th) to give a talk about Red. Here are the presentation slides and the video.


If you are experiencing issues seeing the slides in flash format, here's a PDF version.




I am not a great speaker, so you might want to go through the slides first, and eventually have a look at my corresponding comments in the video (it is too long anyway). I need to make shorter and faster presentations in the future.

11 comments:

  1. You say the Red/System is faster than C.
    What is it doing differently to actually beat C (a pretty astounding feat)?
    Do you have any benchmarks against C?

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  2. Of course, it is not faster than C. I am sorry if my slide #12 is not clear enough (which might have trigger an erroneous statement during my talk). Red/System aims to have 1 to 3 times C performances.

    I will modify that slide to avoid bringing confusion.

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  3. I was considering saying something about it, but let it go because the language is ambiguous. However, "x times" is usually interpreted as "x times" faster, not "taking x times as long to execute". The fact that Red and Red/System are shown side by side in that slide would lead to the correct interpretation, but it's confusing.

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  4. It sounded less ambiguous in french, I should have been more careful when writing it. Anyway, I have modified slide #12 to make it more clear now.

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  5. Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking perhaps you had some way of reducing stack usage or something (more register use) ... :-)

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  6. About optimizations for performances, I plan to copy a lot of good ideas from LuaJIT. This will be implemented at the end of the bootstrap stage, when the Red/System compiler will be re-implemented in Red.

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  7. Great Stuff Doc!

    Paul T.

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  8. Hi,

    I like this a lot. Red looks very promising to me.
    The presentation is slow indeed. The statement that Rebol is abandoned by Carl Sassenrath is based on?
    About the presentation slides:
    On sheet 12, as earlier stated, there is an improvement if you replace the x with the text 'by a factor of'
    The DInglish (or is it Fringlish) on sheet 24 'wrote' should be corrected to 'written' 4 times, please!
    Sheet 23, I know REBOL is not available on HAIKU and HAIKU (www.haiku-os.org) is still in Alpha state, but it would be nice to have on HAIKU later on.
    Sheet 32: a is less than b when a = 1 and b = 12. The word 'lesser' is used as in "a is the lesser from the two choices a and b" 'less' is more ;-)

    Hope this proves to be a useful comment to you, hope to hear a lot from Red.

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  9. Hi iArnold,

    Thank you very much for your fixes and improvements. I will apply them to the presentation ASAP.

    About REBOL and Carl, he has stopped making any public communication on REBOL since a _year_, but it seems that he went back to some coding on REBOL3 recently (a couple of weeks ago, said a developer in close contact with him), so REBOL situation might _eventually_ improve in future. My statement about Carl was also meant to be a bit provocative, so that Carl gets out of the cave and prove me wrong. ;-)

    Thanks for your kind support.

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  10. Hi iArnold,

    All your suggested changes/fixes have been applied. Thanks for your kind help.

    Cheers!

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  11. how reliable is Red

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