Sneak peek at Red on Android | Hacker News Reader

Sneak peek at Red on Android

red-lang.org

33 pointsabqwe13 comments

I'm a little confused about Red, which is a language I've been keeping an eye on for a while. They seem to be trying to target practically every type of development on every platform, with an incomplete language and a very small (no?) team. Also, recently there was an odd ICO tangent, where it's unclear how much money they raised. It smelled a bit opportunistic to me, and I would have expected recent news to tie into the ICO promises... But, compared to most of the rest of the ICOs it might still be one of the least dodgy.

> a very small (no?) team

"very small" doesn't mean "not proficient".

> there was an odd ICO tangent

The main purpose of which was to raise enough money for hiring new team members (which, as you pointed out, is "very small").

> They seem to be trying to target practically every type of development on every platform

And results so far are great, considering that language is in alpha version: Android support (which means Java bridge, there's also a prototype for .NET one [3]), native GUI backends and declarative DSL for UI creation, low-level DSL for system programming and much more (read full description on website), fitting in ~1MB executable and, perfomance-wise, comparable with other scripting languages in speed (while having zero optimizations).

> it's unclear how much money they raised

Certanily enough to continue development with confidence. During ICO, all tokens were sould out. You can roughly calculate the cash value by yourself with ETH/USD ratio during ICO period and RED/ETH ratios for each round of exchange.

> I would have expected recent news to tie into the ICO promises

I suggest you to check recent articles on red-lang.org. ATM Red Foundation is working on establishing rules for retroactive community rewards and launching website for monthly reports. Core team progresses towards 0.6.4 release and adjusts future roadmap.

As for /C3 project promises - the team already have a working prototype for wallet Dapp [1], and, per recent announcement, should start on Ethereum node wrapper ASAP. These two goals were set for Q1 2018 (see p.11 in the whitepaper [1]).

[1] : https://github.com/qtxie/red-wallet

[2] : https://ico.red-lang.org/RED-whitepaper.pdf

[3] : https://github.com/red/red/tree/master/bridges/dotnet

Thanks for those answers. Let me add something for helping the visually impaired who have troubles reading the Red blog. Here is a simple Red script to retrieve information from the Red blog, then calculate and display (with a color fade-in effect) the upper bound result of the RED tokens sales:

    Red []

    page: read https://www.red-lang.org/2018/01/red-here-we-go.html
    
    parse page [
        thru "Private investors" thru "(" copy angels to ")"
        thru "open rounds"       thru "(" copy public to ")"
        thru "Private Investors" thru "&gt;" copy angels-price to "RED"
        thru "Open round"        thru "&gt;" copy public-price to "RED"
    ]
    angels: to-integer trim/with angels ","
    public: to-integer trim/with public ","
    result: (angels / load angels-price) + (public / load public-price)

    view [
        title "Token Sales Result"
        below
        text 300 "And the (upper) bound sales result (in eth) is:"
        h1 300 center bold beige beige rate 5 data result
        on-time [
            ff: face/font
            repeat c 3 [ff/color/:c: ff/color/:c - pick 4.2.3 c]
            if ff/color = black [face/rate: none]
        ]
    ]

This short example relies on two eDSL, one for parsing data, one for building a GUI. Such built-in features (not requiring any library) shouldn't be that bad for an "incomplete" language, right?

I assume "visually impaired" was a little jab at me, well, I must be really blind, because having read the blog posts it's still unclear to me how many tokens were sold and how much money was raised.

Even title of this [1] blog post didn't ring a bell? It doesn't make much sense to cash out raised ETH now, because of the bear market.

[1] : https://www.red-lang.org/2018/01/red-token-sale-success.html

https://www.red-lang.org/2018/01/red-here-we-go.html shows the complete breakdown of token distribution, and is where the data is pulled from in the above script demo.

In a very real sense, we can't think of "money raised" in terms of a country's legal tender (what cryptos call 'fiat currency'). Remember, cryptocurrencies have no jurisdiction. You can see how much ETH was raised, but what that really tells you, we hope, is how much investment interest there was, based on the technology backing the project.

The post was about Android support. Why do you care how much the ICO did or didn't make?

Let's say it made money/ETH--and even if a program in the language can print out a message saying it did. What does this have to do with your assessment of the technology, or its completeness or incompleteness?

Made a mistake, whitepaper footnote is [2], not [1].

> I would have expected recent news to tie into the ICO promises

Please read the blog entry again. It specifically says:

> Those features were implemented in about a month and half in August/September 2017. We have delayed the continuation of that work, as we need to focus our resources on higher priority tasks for now, like Red/C3 and full I/O support.

If you also read https://www.red-lang.org/2018/03/roadmap-updates.html, it should clarify exactly where we are and where we're headed.

Red is super cool, has anybody used Red/System with much success? I've been trying to figure it out so I can play around with it, but I can only get normal Red to compile.

If you know C - all it takes to start with R/S is to read language specs [1]. What specific problems do you have with compilation?

[1] : https://static.red-lang.org/red-system-specs.html

Just compiling the file. That's what I'm having trouble with. Is it the same method as normal Red scripts? Is there a compiler flag I need, or just the opening Red/System [] in the source? That's the part that is rough for me. Just a simple Red/System vs Red hello world (including compiler instructions) would be of great help.

Uhm...

Red:

    Red []
    print "hello world"

Red/System:

    Red/System []
    print "hello world"

Both are compiled with ./red -c file. "Rough", you say?

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