Evolving Ren-C is a messy and difficult balancing act. Due to the experimental nature and bus-factor-of-one staffing, it's not always a good use of time to completely push through a change in all code...until it's seen to be a good change.
The adoption of dozens of experimental ideas had led to a situation where being able to bootstrap the codebase stalled... for possibly the longest period yet. This is to say that while the old 2018-era executable is used to make all the .h and .c files to build the current sources, the executable it built would be unable to do so.
But a few days ago, I managed to accomplish bootstrap. And I've gotten several other codebases that had been atrophying (Whitespacers, Rebol-HTTPD, Query) up to date.
While there are a lot of shaky parts (in particular, the workings of the new form of methodization that relies on leading-dot .member accesses), I'd say overall things are very promising.
One of the toughest points was the institution of "strict mode"... where you cannot assign to a variable that has not been pre-declared in some way (either as a module-level declaration, a LET, a <local>, made with WRAP, etc.) This is a big change, but a good one... for all the reasons "strict mode" is known to be good, but also because it eliminated "attachment binding"
Not Easy, But Very Instructive
In some ways, the story of Ren-C's evolution is told by Rebmake, and the process which produces all the .h and .c files that the build relies on.
It's certainly one of the top 3 biggest and snakiest Rebol codebases (I'd argue it's probably the trickiest codebase of its size, moreso than Red or Atronix Zoe). And it contains the code of Carl, Shixin, Brett, BrianH, myself, and others... a mixture of styles, and patches, and hacks. Some huge bends come from needing to run in an executable that's not much beyond a patched version of what ran in 2018.
I've also explained why adopting Rebmake was very consequential, and complicating. It brought concerns to the build process to be a superset of CMake and GNU make, instead of being narrow and focused like other approaches (Giulio and Andreas tried their hands at much more succinct ideas, and Oldes is using something much lighter in daily work today).
But this has informed the design, hardened it, and challenged it.
A New "Weird" World: Driven By Reason and Experience
With changes like :refinement instead of /refinement, and the switch to where actions can be invoked as /foo, plus member variables being indicated with .field -- things are starting to look quite different.
But I can say with confidence that from a usage perspective, it is very clearly better.
The slashes for functions is quite empowering. Unlike the pox of :deactivating GET-WORD!s, slashes tell you what you know instead of what you DON'T know.
Refinements being done with colons does come out as what seems like a casualty of that, where you can have something like:
data: copy:part series pos
It mingles refinements and assignments notationally, which some might find bad. Though I think it's nothing like mingling field accesses and refinements with both being slashes.
And once you get used to it, I think it actually is nice to have the colons blend more quietly. This allows the slashes to stand out, and it really is a better use of it popping.
The .field accesses are--I think--a pretty definite win. I've made it so that the lone period (.) defaults to one of those sneaky functions that looks at the current environment, and gives you the object that the .field accesses are from. So if you really want to bring all those fields into scope where you can use them undecorated, you'd be able to do something along the lines of:
use <*> .
print ["Now I can access" field "without dots"]
(Though the notation for that is still in flux.)
But really, it's very hard to keep things straight and know what's an argument and what's a member... so I like the dots. (They were added on purpose...and are harder to implement than just doing lookup in the object as a higher priority for regular words, so of course I must like them!)
So...What's NOT Working Well?
One of the biggest problems I've run into is that the easy interplay between WORD! and SET-WORD! and GET-WORD! has been replaced by some really finicky sequence mechanics.
For instance, this no longer works:
>> to word! first [a: 10]
** Error
TO's rule is reversibility. And (to chain! 'a) shouldn't be biased to either a: or :a
Maybe you could argue for saying that a: is more useful, and so TO for sequences should put words at the head. But that's not really the case for a. or a/, is it?
Then you have composites like /a:, and the question of just how many routines have to deal with these composites... and what the rules are. If you do a SET of plain a to an action, should that be an error unless you change it to set /a ? Should SET support /a: or make you extract things down?
I've been building little parts to help attack this, such as a function RESOLVE for picking the variable out of a sequence:
>> resolve first [/a:]
== a
>> resolve first [a.b/]
== a.b
And that's the kind of thing that helps pick up the slack from things like TO WORD!.
It's still new and awkward territory. There's certainly going to be some amount of irreducible complexity that comes from working with these new parts, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to reduce the pain as things develop.
Overall, Things Are Reasonably Strong
I talk about how Ren-C's development methodology just keeps solidifying, to let it move on to building higher things.
Even with many pieces teetering on the edge, there's still a solidity underneath it all that means I almost never wind up chasing Heisenbugs. When a part needs to be hardened, it can be hardened.
In any case, it's good to see it bootstrapping after a long time of not. I'm hopeful that by the end of the year I'll feel comfortable enough to make new bootstrap executables and push out the web build, so expect a big "drop" sometime in December.