No problem. Rebol is built on C I think and is an interpreted language that I would guess is similar to Ruby in speed (as in fairly slow). Red should be a lot faster, but I wonder if they'll ever get there with the project being so ambitious. I do think you currently need Rebol to build the Red binary, but it'll eventually be fully self hosted and under 5 MB in size. A Red OS would be pretty neat as in you could use the high level words in interpreted mode and throw in some Red-System level code for performance if you need it. I'm a little concerned though that some of the high performance libraries will be commercial. I don't mind paying, but licensing always gets cloudy in those cases.