Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

A key problem of software development today is software bloat, where huge toolchains and development environments are needed in software coding and deployment. Red significantly reduces this bloat by offering a minimalist but complete toolchain. This is the first introductory book about it, and it will get you up and running with Red as quickly as possible. This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Red to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers who want to add Red to their skill set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Red and in-depth informative examples using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple metaprogramming, functions, collections, GUI applications, and more. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to start your own projects in Red.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
Assessments

Red/System

Red/System, the C-level, purely imperative dialect of Red, has four main purposes:

  • It has the role of an IR (intermediate representation) language for compiled Red code, and efficiently compiles directly into machine code for all targets, so it does not generate C or assembler as an intermediary.
  • It is the language in which part of Red itself and notably the runtime system is written.
  • It can be embedded inside Red apps for fast code support, so, whenever your Red app needs to run faster, you can rewrite the code pieces that perform the worst in Red/System to achieve huge performance gains.
  • It can be used to write low-level programs and perform system programming.
Red/System is a dialect, a subset of Red, and an embedded DSL (domain-specific language) of its host language Red, yet the host is implemented in that dialect.

You can find the Red/System source code in the...