But my feeling on "fast" is generally; how fast does the solution need to be? I have a co-worker who complained that more business logic client-side would slow down our application (it won't, of course). Our application gets on average about 2 requests per second for any given customer. It is by all human perception plenty fast. It doesn't need to be any faster and even being a little slower would go unnoticed. Its all behind a login and isn't intended to be crawled so SEO isn't an issue. Yet once again the ultra-vague benchmark of "fast" gets bandied about needlessly.

But back to Red. From what I've seen its pretty fast but its also early days for the language and they're not focused yet on optimization. Looking at how it is designed I can see how it will be eventually VERY fast once optimized.

There are 2 levels in Red. Red is the high level language (think scripting level) while Red/System is the low level dialect (think C). In general, because the compiler is new and non-optimizing, Red/System will probably be half the speed of C from an optimizing compiler right now. As always, algorithms are the big win.