When we introduced static linking of C libraries, the promise was simple: name a .lib or .a archive in your #import, compile with -s, and ship one self-contained executable, no DLLs riding along, nothing to install on the target machine. There was one big frontier left, and everyone saw it coming: the libraries people want most (vision, GUI, audio, machine learning) are written in C++. A C++ library is a very different animal to link: it brings global constructors, exceptions, RTTI, templates, thread-local storage, and an entire language runtime that expects to be wired up just so. Until now,…
When we introduced static linking of C libraries, the promise was simple: name a .lib or .a archive in your #import, compile with -s, and ship one self-contained executable, no DLLs riding along, nothing to install on the target machine. There was one big frontier left, and everyone saw it coming: the libraries people want most (vision, GUI, audio, machine learning) are written in C++. A C++ library is a very different animal to link: it brings global constructors, exceptions, RTTI, templates, thread-local storage, and an entire language runtime that expects to be wired up just so. Until now,…
We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest.We must learn to sail in high winds.-Aristotle OnassisThe coding agents revolution is taking the world by storm and we are right in the middle of it. Like most of you, we have experimented with the agent's amazing (and frustrating) capabilities, pondering the role of Red and our vision in that new world. The conclusion is (un)surprisingly clear, Red is still very relevant and will be even more so as we improve it to better work with agents. In the meantime, here are some treats, starting with expanding our toolchain to support…
We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds. -Aristotle Onassis The coding agents revolution is taking the world by storm and we are right in the middle of it. Like most of you, we have experimented with the agent's amazing (and frustrating) capabilities, pondering the role of Red and our vision in that new world. The conclusion is (un)surprisingly clear, Red is still very relevant and will be even more so as we improve it to better work with agents. In the meantime, here are some treats, starting with expanding our toolchain to support…
This new milestone brings many low-level improvements to Red's memory management and garbage collecting. Most of those are long-planned additions needed to complete the internal memory model and make it robust enough for the future stable Red v1.0. First, here is a simplified overview of the Red memory model (existing parts in green color, new parts in orange, non-Red parts in blue):All Red values are stored in series. Some Red values require one or more buffers to hold their content. The values can never reference a buffer directly, but only through a node reference, to enable relocation…
Here is a short blog entry just to explain the newly added multiple monitor support to View engine. Screen faces Each connected monitor gets associated with a screen face in system/view/screens list. You can check that all monitors have been detected correctly using (two monitors in this case): >> length? system/view/screens == 2 Each screen's /offset indicates the screen position using virtual screen coordinates. The main screen gets a (0, 0) offset. All other screens are positioned relatively to that, in the same virtual space. Screen sizes are also expressed in virtual coordinates.…
Here is a short blog entry just to explain the newly added multiple monitor support to View engine. Screen faces Each connected monitor gets associated with a screen face in system/view/screens list. You can check that all monitors have been detected correctly using (two monitors in this case): >> length? system/view/screens == 2 Each screen's /offset indicates the screen position using virtual screen coordinates. The main screen gets a (0, 0) offset. All other screens are positioned relatively to that, in the same virtual space. Screen sizes are also expressed in virtual coordinates.…
This new milestone brings many low-level improvements to Red's memory management and garbage collecting. Most of those are long-planned additions needed to complete the internal memory model and make it robust enough for the future stable Red v1.0. First, here is a simplified overview of the Red memory model (existing parts in green color, new parts in orange, non-Red parts in blue): All Red values are stored in series. Some Red values require one or more buffers to hold their content. The values can never reference a buffer directly, but only through a node reference, to enable relocation…
Last year, qtxie worked on a toy text backend project and submitted a PR for that. After some extra additions and testing recently, it has now been merged even if it is still incomplete, it is usable enough. So, in addition to the shiny GUI backends in Red/View, now we have an old-school text-based user interfaces (TUI) backend for the View engine! The new TUI backend has currently a subset of the GUI backends features. Here is an overview: View styles: base, panel, button, check, radio, field, text, progress, rich-text, image and text-list. Draw commands: text, line, box, triangle, circle,…
Last year, qtxie worked on a toy text backend project and submitted a PR for that. After some extra additions and testing recently, it has now been merged even if it is still incomplete, it is usable enough. So, in addition to the shiny GUI backends in Red/View, now we have an old-school text-based user interfaces (TUI) backend for the View engine! The new TUI backend has currently a subset of the GUI backends features. Here is an overview: View styles: base, panel, button, check, radio, field, text, progress, rich-text, image and text-list. Draw commands: text, line, box, triangle, circle,…
We're often asked what Red can be used for, or what apps have been written in Red. Red can be used to write almost anything, but the sparse ecosystem and some missing pieces limit certain use cases. It's used a lot for in-house data processing, custom DSLs, simple GUI apps, and more. We also used it to build Redlake's DiaGrammar product. When we heard that someone had written a commercial app in Red, we thought that was great news, and we're here to tell you a little about it. Your first question is likely "What is it?" and the second "Where can I get it?". It's an XML processor, and you can…
We're often asked what Red can be used for, or what apps have been written in Red. Red can be used to write almost anything, but the sparse ecosystem and some missing pieces limit certain use cases. It's used a lot for in-house data processing, custom DSLs, simple GUI apps, and more. We also used it to build Redlake's DiaGrammar product. When we heard that someone had written a commercial app in Red, we thought that was great news, and we're here to tell you a little about it. Your first question is likely "What is it?" and the second "Where can I get it?". It's an XML processor, and you can…
Bumping up the version number was motivated by the breaking syntax change done recently. We do not offer specific builds for a given version number anymore since we provide automatic builds (with builds history) on each new master commit. Though, the changelog for new version number changes will still be provided...and this one is pretty big as it covers about 5000 commits! Hope this will help users who might have missed some changes to catch up.613 PRs were merged, 2415 fix commits were pushed, among which 902 are closing issues tracked on Github. The most notable new features and changes…
Bumping up the version number was motivated by the breaking syntax change done recently. We do not offer specific builds for a given version number anymore since we provide automatic builds (with builds history) on each new master commit. Though, the changelog for new version number changes will still be provided...and this one is pretty big as it covers about 5000 commits! Hope this will help users who might have missed some changes to catch up. 613 PRs were merged, 2415 fix commits were pushed, among which 902 are closing issues tracked on Github. The most notable new features and changes…
Sometimes deep changes take a huge amount of code. Sometimes they take a lot of detailed explanation and consideration, leading to long discussions and people taking sides. Rarely does an important syntactic change to a language happen quickly, with universal agreement, simple implementation, and tools to help update scripts in the wild. Today is one of those rare days. Admittedly, this idea has been discussed for a long time. It would surface, people nodded their virtual heads, and it would submerge again. Today it's ready to deploy. Not only that, but Rebol3 is making the same change, so…
Sometimes deep changes take a huge amount of code. Sometimes they take a lot of detailed explanation and consideration, leading to long discussions and people taking sides. Rarely does an important syntactic change to a language happen quickly, with universal agreement, simple implementation, and tools to help update scripts in the wild. Today is one of those rare days. Admittedly, this idea has been discussed for a long time. It would surface, people nodded their virtual heads, and it would submerge again. Today it's ready to deploy. Not only that, but Rebol3 is making the same change, so…
We finally got tab navigation implemented! You might think it should have been an easy feature to add, but achieving a consistent and controllable behavior across our different native GUI backends is not that straightforward. So we opted for a mixed implementation with a general high-level navigation layer in Red and left spatial navigation handling to each backend, in order to preserve the native behavior as much as possible. Automatic navigation By default, pressing TAB key will allow you to navigate to all the GUI widgets in a window, capable of acquiring the focus. Once the last widget is…
We finally got tab navigation implemented! You might think it should have been an easy feature to add, but achieving a consistent and controllable behavior across our different native GUI backends is not that straightforward. So we opted for a mixed implementation with a general high-level navigation layer in Red and left spatial navigation handling to each backend, in order to preserve the native behavior as much as possible. Automatic navigation By default, pressing TAB key will allow you to navigate to all the GUI widgets in a window, capable of acquiring the focus. Once the last widget is…
Maybe you didn't notice, but Red/View, our GUI engine, has subpixel precision from the beginning! Unfortunately, that level of precision was not directly accessible to end users, until now. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we had subpixel resolution only so far. The guilty part is the pair! datatype being limited to integer components only, while subpixel precison requires decimal numbers. So we have recently introduced new datatypes to cope with that. What urged us to make those changes now was a very peculiar visual glitch caused by that dissonance. That glitch happens during…
Maybe you didn't notice, but Red/View, our GUI engine, has subpixel precision from the beginning! Unfortunately, that level of precision was not directly accessible to end users, until now. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we had subpixel resolution only so far. The guilty part is the pair! datatype being limited to integer components only, while subpixel precison requires decimal numbers. So we have recently introduced new datatypes to cope with that. What urged us to make those changes now was a very peculiar visual glitch caused by that dissonance. That glitch happens during…
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