When we introduced static linking of C libraries, the promise was simple: name a .lib or .a archive in your #import, compile with -s, and ship one self-contained executable, no DLLs riding along, nothing to install on the target machine. There was one big frontier left, and everyone saw it coming: t...

We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest.We must learn to sail in high winds.-Aristotle OnassisThe coding agents revolution is taking the world by storm and we are right in the middle of it. Like most of you, we have experimented with the agent's amazing (and frustrating) capab...

Here is a short blog entry just to explain the newly added multiple monitor support to View engine. Screen faces Each connected monitor gets associated with a screen face in system/view/screens list. You can check that all monitors have been detected correctly using (two monitors in this case): >> l...

This new milestone brings many low-level improvements to Red's memory management and garbage collecting. Most of those are long-planned additions needed to complete the internal memory model and make it robust enough for the future stable Red v1.0. First, here is a simplified overview of the Red mem...

Last year, qtxie worked on a toy text backend project and submitted a PR for that. After some extra additions and testing recently, it has now been merged even if it is still incomplete, it is usable enough. So, in addition to the shiny GUI backends in Red/View, now we have an old-school text-based ...

We're often asked what Red can be used for, or what apps have been written in Red. Red can be used to write almost anything, but the sparse ecosystem and some missing pieces limit certain use cases. It's used a lot for in-house data processing, custom DSLs, simple GUI apps, and more. We also used it...

Bumping up the version number was motivated by the breaking syntax change done recently. We do not offer specific builds for a given version number anymore since we provide automatic builds (with builds history) on each new master commit. Though, the changelog for new version number changes will sti...

Sometimes deep changes take a huge amount of code. Sometimes they take a lot of detailed explanation and consideration, leading to long discussions and people taking sides. Rarely does an important syntactic change to a language happen quickly, with universal agreement, simple implementation, and to...

We finally got tab navigation implemented! You might think it should have been an easy feature to add, but achieving a consistent and controllable behavior across our different native GUI backends is not that straightforward. So we opted for a mixed implementation with a general high-level navigatio...

Maybe you didn't notice, but Red/View, our GUI engine, has subpixel precision from the beginning! Unfortunately, that level of precision was not directly accessible to end users, until now.  Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we had subpixel resolution only so far. The guilty part is th...

It's Time to Apply Yourself to Red Red has never had an apply function, though we knew it would come someday. In the meantime, some of us rolled our own. Gregg's was simple, neither flexible nor efficient, and just a couple lines of code. Boris made a much more capable version, but it could still on...

Since many years, we are offering pre-built binaries for the Red toolchain, as a more convenient way to use Red, even if it is not strictly needed, as Red can be run from its sources, the toolchain being run by a Rebol2 interpreter. As the Red REPL and toolchain are not run by the same engine, the c...

You cannot have missed that in the last months (and even last years), our overall progress has slowed down drastically. One of the main reasons is that we have spread our limited resources chasing different objectives while making little progress on the core language. That is not satisfying at all a...

Another quarter, another blog post. Seems almost rushed after the previous drought.  To set the stage, I'll start with a bit of a rant about complexity. If you just want the meat of what's happening in the Red world, feel free to skip the introduction.  Complexity Considerations: Part 1 I liked what...

It's been almost a year since our last blog post. Sorry about that. It's one of those things that falls off our radar without a person dedicated to it, and we run lean so don't have anyone filling that role right now. We know it's important, even if we have many other channels where people can get i...

In the past months, many new features were added to Red/System, the low-level dialect embedded in Red. Here is a sum up if you missed them. Subroutines During the work on the low-level parts of the new Red lexer, the need arised for intra-function factorization abilities to keep the lexer code as DR...

A programming language lexer is the part in charge of converting textual code representation into a structured memory representation. In Red, it is accomplished by the load function, which calls the lower-level transcode native. Until now, Red was relying on a lexer entirely written using the Parse ...

It's been a busy start to the year for the team. Work has continued on many fronts, and we have some new team members helping us to keep the momentum going. We announced in January that GTK and the Fast Lexer were close, and they are even closer now. The hard part about making announcements is that ...

Hello and happy new year, friends of Red! We have some exciting projects we’ve been working on that will be available this year, including a new product. Let’s talk a little about what the team has been working on behind the scenes. (TL;DR: A cool new product with Red in 2020...plus, a robust prelim...

Welcome to December, friends of Red. It's an intent and focused time of year as we wind down 2019, and the core team is making important moves (sometimes literally!) to set us up for an ambitious 2020. But first, here are just a few things that happened in November. First and foremost, it's always g...

The original commentary was posted in Red's Gitter channel, here, by Gregg Irwin, one of our core team members, in response to various requests for the ability to create new datatypes in Red. As a writer, Red has always appealed to me because of its flexibility; but, of course, "the [lexicon] devil ...

What made the fast-lexer branch a priority? Several things. It started when @dockimbel looked into ticket #3606, which was impossible to fix currently, and we didn't want to give up on the auto-syncing between /text and /data facets. So he had to consider bigger options, including how to make the le...

Over the last few weeks the Red Lang core team drilled down to make some truly great progress on Red's fast-lexer branch--while we also gained valuable support from the contributions of Red doers and makers as they consolidate a world of useful information and resources. Fast-Lexer Benchmarks In the...

Hello to all the great makers, doers and creative people who are using Red, helping the Red Language grow and improve! As always, there's a standing invitation for you to join us on Gitter, Telegram or Github (if you haven't already) to ask questions and tell us about your Red-powered projects. Here...

As part of the R&D work on port! datatype in port-type branch, we have implemented a GPIO driver for Raspberry Pi boards, as a gpio:// scheme (no third-party library needed). This work helped define the low-level API for ports written in purely Red/System or a mix of Red and Red/System. The Raspberr...

We are releasing today the version 0.4.0 of the RED Wallet with several major new features. As a reminder, the RED Wallet aims to be a simple and very secure wallet for the major cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, and ERC-20 tokens). Safety is enforced through the mandatory use of a hardware key (Ledger or...

If you are an active member of the Red community, you will have likely been keeping track of Red's progress through our Gitter rooms and Github repositories, but we wanted to officially bring everyone up to speed with a shiny new blog post. The team has been busy since January on many fronts, multip...