What does HackerNews think of red?
Red is a next-generation programming language strongly inspired by Rebol, but with a broader field of usage thanks to its native-code compiler, from system programming to high-level scripting and cross-platform reactive GUI, while providing modern support for concurrency, all in a zero-install, zero-config, single ~1MB file!
I am really looking forward to learn more about this language when 1.0 comes out, especially because of its ambitious feature list [3] (programming across the low/high-level spectrum, etc.), Lisp influences and the Logo-like syntax inherited from Rebol.
- [1] https://www.red-lang.org/2022/07/the-road-to-10.html - [2] https://www.red-lang.org/p/roadmap_2.html - [3] https://github.com/red/red
It's very similar to Rebol and is under active development. If you like Rebol and haven't tried Red, it's worth taking a look:
Since then, REBOL in a kinda "pre-3" version was (after long nagging by the community, and arguably to everybody's surprise), released under Apache license circa 2012 [2]; though IIUC, in a kinda "unfinished" state, although I'm not really sure to what extent. Still, the Red language development goes on, I believe in part because of somewhat different philosophies and goals.
Back to the language(s) themselves, the REBOL & Red family is very interesting and I think perspective-widening -- which also means it requires some effort to understand well, it's not your typical "Algol in new clothes". What sounds most interesting to me is that it seems to be kinda "dialect-oriented" -- meaning that to use it idiomatically, you should get used to writing tiny parsers (with provided toolbox) for small ad-hoc DSLs. That sounds very nice and interesting, but I unfortunately have one issue with learning that -- that I can't really find good learning resources for that (neither for REBOL nor for Red). Even the official REBOL docs/"manual" seem to be too much "example-oriented" for me; I heavily miss some good "specification"/exhaustive manual, which would show me what are the limits, how does the full BNF look like, etc. In other (old) news, notably, REBOL is cited as an important influence for JSON [2][3].
[1b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_%28programming_language%29
[1c] https://github.com/red/red
Rebol 3 ("alpha version") is open-sourced under Apache 2.0 license; most recent commit is dated Mar 04 2014; not quite yesterday, but certainly not "over a year ago". See:
https://github.com/rebol/rebol
As to Red, it is a totally separate project, kinda rewrite from scratch of Rebol (started when Rebol 3 was still closed source and seemed dead), and although still not complete, looks very lively:
-- see also the pretty status/completion tracking graphs for Red at: