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REBOL was first built by Carl Sassenrath, who is probably best known for his work on the Amiga operating system. REBOL was cool, but happened when a half dozen

REBOL was first built by Carl Sassenrath, who is probably best known for his work on the Amiga operating system. REBOL was cool, but happened when a half dozen similarly cool languages sprung up that also had the feature of being free and open source (while REBOL was proprietary and cost a little money). REBOL had some novel ideas, and some shortcuts for some particular types of development making for strikingly concise code in some specific cases, and overall a nice design. I think it's neat that there's an OSS implementation, but I have so many other things on my todo list that I've never done more than give it a glance. I just don't see how I'd make productive use of it in the kinds of projects I do (given interop requirements I have).

throwaway7645 10y ago
Please give Red a look. It can run like Python or can be made compiled AOT to a tiny binary using a C like systems language that runs fast. You can call Red from C and possibly vice-versa (not sure bout the latter). It has an awesome REPL, amazing GUI DSL, is homoiconic like lisp for easy macros, and is OS/free. I'm not sure where this couldn't be used as it can be both super high level or very low level.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Ill add they have Red/System for low-level. Some kernel or server coders should try putting some code through it to see how it does.
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    Fair enough, even if it is great, it won't have 30 years of optimizations like some C compilers, but hopefully it is still really fast.
    - greggirwin 10y ago
      The compiler doesn't optimize at all right now, but aims for simplicity. There was an article some time back about the best switches to use for most C compilers: compile for size. It often gave some of the best performance IIRC, the rationale being better cache use on chips.
      - throwaway7645 10y ago
        When will it optimize, or will it? I'd like to see some benchmarks on the main page for a couple of algorithms like Fibbonaci in both Red & Red System compared to a popular scripting language like Python and a popular office language like Java. I would hope Red is close to Python in speed and Red System to Java. Obviously it won't be yet, but performance is important and if it isn't a priority, I'll look elsewhere (note that I don't mean that negatively...I'm very impressed with the Red community, I just want to have my 1929 Latour with my Kobe beef riding in my personal spaceship alright ;) ). Forgive me.
        greggirwin 10y ago
        As you know, benchmarks are often fun but just as often meaningless. And premature optimization being the root of...anyway. ;) It may come. JIT is planned. I don't know of any language that wants to be slow, and I can only speak for myself, but I think Red's goal is one of overall performance. In 1991, people told me I couldn't use VB, because it was too slow. I countered that my app would be 12-18 weeks faster than their C app. :) Still, this is 2017 and we have options. Red won't be fast enough for everyone, or everything. But it will be faster than a lot of alternatives for many purposes. What kind of stuff do you need maximum performance for, how much of your work is that, and what are some of your real-world examples and performance criteria? I work best with concrete examples.
        throwaway7645 10y ago
        One of the things that initially excited me was being able to write code like Python for parsing and automating office tasks and then dropping down to RedSystem for numerical work like matrices and various algorithms and perhaps some embedded work like talking to an arduino. If it could truly do that, I'd give up needing to know 9 languages depending on what I'm doing.

throwaway7645 10y ago

Please give Red a look. It can run like Python or can be made compiled AOT to a tiny binary using a C like systems language that runs fast. You can call Red from C and possibly vice-versa (not sure bout the latter). It has an awesome REPL, amazing GUI DSL, is homoiconic like lisp for easy macros, and is OS/free. I'm not sure where this couldn't be used as it can be both super high level or very low level.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Ill add they have Red/System for low-level. Some kernel or server coders should try putting some code through it to see how it does.
- throwaway7645 10y ago
  Fair enough, even if it is great, it won't have 30 years of optimizations like some C compilers, but hopefully it is still really fast.
  - greggirwin 10y ago
    The compiler doesn't optimize at all right now, but aims for simplicity. There was an article some time back about the best switches to use for most C compilers: compile for size. It often gave some of the best performance IIRC, the rationale being better cache use on chips.
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      When will it optimize, or will it? I'd like to see some benchmarks on the main page for a couple of algorithms like Fibbonaci in both Red & Red System compared to a popular scripting language like Python and a popular office language like Java. I would hope Red is close to Python in speed and Red System to Java. Obviously it won't be yet, but performance is important and if it isn't a priority, I'll look elsewhere (note that I don't mean that negatively...I'm very impressed with the Red community, I just want to have my 1929 Latour with my Kobe beef riding in my personal spaceship alright ;) ). Forgive me.
      - greggirwin 10y ago
        As you know, benchmarks are often fun but just as often meaningless. And premature optimization being the root of...anyway. ;) It may come. JIT is planned. I don't know of any language that wants to be slow, and I can only speak for myself, but I think Red's goal is one of overall performance. In 1991, people told me I couldn't use VB, because it was too slow. I countered that my app would be 12-18 weeks faster than their C app. :) Still, this is 2017 and we have options. Red won't be fast enough for everyone, or everything. But it will be faster than a lot of alternatives for many purposes. What kind of stuff do you need maximum performance for, how much of your work is that, and what are some of your real-world examples and performance criteria? I work best with concrete examples.
        throwaway7645 10y ago
        One of the things that initially excited me was being able to write code like Python for parsing and automating office tasks and then dropping down to RedSystem for numerical work like matrices and various algorithms and perhaps some embedded work like talking to an arduino. If it could truly do that, I'd give up needing to know 9 languages depending on what I'm doing.