posted by Kaj-de-Vos on Thu 15th Mar 2012 12:48 UTC
Version 0.2.5 of the new Red/System programming language has been released, after it celebrated its first birthday at the third Red Developers Conference. Bindings with the standard C library, cURL, SDL and SQLite that were developed over the past year are now properly supported on Syllable Desktop. Conference videos introduce Red/System and the bindings. Earlier, new floating point support was released (Mandelbrot screenshot; demo source, see the .reds file).Red now has support for proper initialisation of the standard C library, for Red/System programs or other libraries that use it. This has been developed in collaboration between the Red and Syllable projects. Other platforms got by without it so far, but on Syllable Desktop, Red/System programs that use the C library required a workaround until now.
The bindings were written by the Syllable project and contributed to the Red project. The goal is to make sure that native and cross-platform Red programs will be able to run on Syllable Desktop. The bindings work on Syllable Desktop, Syllable Server, and other platforms. Red/System is currently implemented in REBOL 2. Therefore, the Red/System compiler doesn't run on Syllable Desktop yet, but Syllable programs can be cross-compiled from other systems. The bindings were developed on Syllable Server.
A new Syllable Desktop development version was released to support Red. It is required for the SQLite database binding (demo source). The new Syllable version fixes support for recent SQLite versions and includes the latest one. The other bindings also work on older versions of Syllable.
Here is a (Fibonacci micro-benchmark example). Like the Mandelbrot example, it is written to compare eight languages, mostly from the REBOL family. This screenshot shows Red/System reading a web page, through the cURL networking library (demo source). Here is an example of a simple paint program running on the SDL multimedia library (demos source). Finally, here is an example of playing audio through SDL.
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