
Red Language: Features and future directions - vmorgulis
http://www.red-lang.org/2015/12/answers-to-community-questions.html
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biot
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?

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

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ZenoArrow
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...](http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/easiest_programming_language.html)

~~~
WaxProlix
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?

~~~
ncx
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](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](https://gitter.im/red/red) .

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Buttons840
What are the performance goals for Red? Which language will it have similar
performance to? Python, Java, or C?

~~~
ncx
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.

