Red Language: Features and future directions | Hacker News Reader

Red Language: Features and future directions

red-lang.org

66 pointsvmorgulis9 comments

It's missing the one key thing every language site (particularly for upcoming languages) should have: a sample program right on the home page. Even if you click over to About, there's a YouTube video followed by what I gather is some kind of Flash file, followed by multiple offers to download a PDF of some slides. Really? Can't you just show me in plain text what the language looks like?

I agree it's useful to have an example program or two on the homepage, but to be honest the Red/Rebol syntax may appear a little quirky at first glance, though it's straightforward to use after completing a quick tutorial.

If you're still interested in seeing some samples, there are a couple on the Red Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_(programming_language)

The current website is based on blogger. There are plans to rewrite it in "the future".

I've never tried Red before, but I've played around with Rebol. What impressed me most was how quickly you could build working applications, and I'm talking insanely fast, IIRC just by following a beginners tutorial I built a working email client with a simple GUI in about 15 minutes.

Perhaps Red can fill a similar niche, for quickly coded apps with a GUI.

EDIT: If anyone wants to see the Rebol tutorial I mentioned before, you can see it here:

http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/easiest_programming_la...

Interesting; I can't get very far in this, since after install, hitting F5 and saving my temp.txt just opens the "Viewtop" window again; maybe a problem with command line arguments is causing it to just run "rebol" again?

Red 0.6 featuring support for creating GUI's on Windows is going to be released soon. So, you can wait for that. Or else just download the automated build from http://www.red-lang.org/p/download.html and try the GUI. For any help, just join the Gitter room https://gitter.im/red/red .

What are the performance goals for Red? Which language will it have similar performance to? Python, Java, or C?

I don't have any benchmarks to share, but I think it's safe to assume that Red will be faster than Python, as it's designed to be statically compiled.

Red 1.0 won't feature many optimizations. So at that time the performance will be comparable to python. After that, their plan is to rewrite the codegenerator in a modular way so that more targets, as well as more optimizations can be added. Also, a JIT compiler will be added. The plans for Red 2.0, as much as I know, is to achieve performance as close to C as possible.

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