Red and Rebol actually look very interesting... Niche languages always look so promising. Thanks for mentioning this - I'd never heard of it before :-)

It's very interesting to see what has happened with Red, since this post. It appears they (the main developers) got sidetracked, possibly because of Corona issues and also side projects. However, they seem much more focused on getting to 1.0 and upgrading to 64-bit. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on how you look at it), they will be another year before producing a beta (and if no delays and sidetracks), later half of 2023.

Will be interesting to see how their beta (if they get there according to plan) will be received. There is a lot more competition and choices out there (and more coming), so don't know how impactful a Red beta in 2023 (or any slipping to 2024) will be in comparison with if it was released in 2020 or even 2021.

@Arkan: :+1:

I am now trying to learn how to write in red, I really liked the programs that are written on it.

SOTE, I share your concern about Red/Pro's direction. Red does appear to be maturing rapidly, though. @astral8wiz, you might try Ungaretti's tutorials [url=http://helpin.red/] here [/url] also, I'm going through them now myself. I've noticed that a lot of example code that's available is a couple of years old, and lots of it needs tweaking to run. There is a github repo (that you've probably already found), but it is not intuitive to search. https://github.com/red/red/wiki/[LINKS]-Projects-showcase-%28links-to-remember%29 is one link that's hard to discover with search engines, but worth a look. (Sorry about not wrapping that in URL code, because of the brackets in [LINKS] it doesn't work.)

Red does look promising, but I think they still have a long way to go. Possibly another 2 years or so. That's still some time out, that who knows what might be out there at that time. And I would have to say that Object Pascal (and the Free Pascal Compiler) is ahead of them in terms of cross-platform development and cross-compiling, despite them posting an inaccurate comparison chart.

I'm also a bit worried about where Red/Pro will go. I hope they don't go full Embarcadero Delphi, with something lose your mind ridiculously expensive or they neuter the freeware version (not the language, but the IDE) into something useless. This also can leave it vulnerable to or comparatively less appealing versus existing open-source freeware projects.

I know some basic AutoHotkey but I have only worked with scripts that can be run with just the single 64-bit executable version; never with Autohotkey.dll.

I went through some sample codes of Red and liked its compactness. I will definitely find time to learn to write some code in Red language. Any suggestions for systematic learning besides "Getting Started" and "Short Red Code Examples" pages?

@astral8wiz, today I managed to get AHK to run from red, via AutoHotkey.dll. I you (or anyone else, of course) is interested, I could post the red-lang code I used. I didn't need a separate AHK script, although that can be done - I just put code inside the red-lang script and passed it to AutoHotkey.dll.

Very interesting indeed.

red -r -t Windows viewer2.red

red -c -t Windows viewer.red

[url=https://www.red-lang.org/]Red [/url] is quite interesting. It produces minuscule binaries. The attached random image viewer, cloned from code by [url=https://wesleyhill.co.uk/p/writing-gui-apps-using-the-red-programming-language/] Wesley Hill[/url] with a little tweak to add a different random image site, is only 69kb expanded (18kb in the zip). The little spreadsheet is about 75kb. However, both need the LibRedRT.dll runtime library also in the folder, so compared with AHK there's maybe not any real size benefit. Interesting nonetheless. Very compact code also, some is in the archive. Active development community, nightly builds. Based on [url=http://www.rebol.com/] Rebol (pronounced like rebel)[/url], which is more mature but (apparently) isn't seeing the same development effort as Red at the moment.

EDIT: Red can in fact compile to programs without dependencies. The code in the program "viewer2.exe" in the zip file was compiled like this:[code]red -r -t Windows viewer2.red[/code] "viewer.exe" was compiled like this:[code]red -c -t Windows viewer.red[/code]Despite the "-c" flag, that means development mode + include the runtime library.

So, perhaps, if you wanted to distribute lots of red apps in one folder, presumably you could compile them all with the "-c" flag, and include the runtime, saving lots of space.

[attachment=1]pico.gif[/attachment]
[attachment=2]viewer.gif[/attachment]
EDIT: Forgot the zip archive, sorry.