Hello there... and welcome... though we continue to be in an extremely experimental state which is really trying to explore what kinds of potentials there are in the odd medium of Rebol-like languages. It's tough to onboard anyone as a user or participant, and so generally things just stay quiet, imagining that it would be the sort of thing that gets advertised "...someday".
(There are some cool tricks, but also a huge mess of half-implemented and not-documented things. I think of it more like an interesting game than I do a tool for "real work". All of its quirky novelty isn't going to help anyone with a deadline. However, there's certainly interesting things to see for those who are persistent with it.)
Glad to hear it. "rebmake" is kind of a disaster, and this post explains how it got that way:
New Build Executables, New Build Strategy
As crazy as maintaining a bootstrap for that is, it does help exercise more code. The goal of Ren-C is to be a maximally skinnable and bendable language, so bending to act like older iterations of itself is one of those challenges.
I like putting declarations before statements because I try to write C as portable assembly, keeping in mind how the assembly would look like when writing C.
Philosophy of initializing variables at their point of declaration aside...you might be a good candidate for appreciating what Ren-C is attempting to accomplish.
But please introduce yourself a bit in the Introductions Section and I can try to answer or address anything particular that has made you curious about the project.