introduction

Red is a new 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, while providing modern support for concurrency and multi-core CPUs.

Main characteristics are:

• Functional, imperative and symbolic
• Prototype-based object support
• Homoiconic (Red is its own meta-language)
• Optionally typed, rich set of datatypes (50+)
• Both statically and JIT-compiled to native code
• Concurrency and parallelism strong support (actors, parallel collections)
• Low-level system programming abilities through the built-in Red/System DSL
• High-level scripting and REPL console support
• Highly embeddable
• Low memory footprint, garbage collected
• Low disk footprint (< 1MB)

Making a Red “Hello World”

The Red toolchain comes as a single half-megabyte executable file that you can download from here for the big-3 platforms.

1. Put the downloaded red binary in a folder that’s in the PATH, or just in the working folder.
2. In a code or text editor, write the following Hello World program:
   
   

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   Red [ Title: "Simple hello world script" ] print "Hello World!"

3. Save it under the name: hello.red
4. From a terminal (works from DOS too), run it with:
   
   

   1	$ red hello.red

5. You should see the Hello World! output.
6. Want to generate a compiled executable from that program?
   
   

   1 2	$ red -c hello.red $ ./hello

7. Want to cross-compile to another supported platform?
   
   

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   $ red -t Windows hello.red $ red -t Darwin hello.red $ red -t Linux-ARM hello.red