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's compilation model

From the previous screenshot of a red -r release-mode compilation, we see that this takes two steps:

  1. The first step doesn't state it explicitly, but it compiles the Red source code to Red/System code.
  1. The second one compiles Red/System to native code:

As mentioned, compilation is done with the REBOL red.r script. Due to this, Red is currently 32-bit only, self-hosting will make 64-bit binaries possible.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can experiment with compiling Red from within the REBOL console. Visit: https://github.com/red/red#running-red-from-the-sources-for-contributors

At this moment, there are two distinct modes of executing a Red program:

  • Running with the interpreter, which takes place in memory and involves some amount of compilation
  • Compiling to native code in a binary file and then running this executable, with Red/System...