Red in San Francisco

For those eager to get some fresh news from Red, here are some great news items that we are sure you will appreciate a lot. As there are many different topics to talk about, we are splitting the news over several articles that we will publish over several days. This is the first part.

Together with Gregg Irwin, the Red community leader, who joined us from Idaho, we had a memorable time in SF, and the trip was successful beyond our wildest expectations! The goal of the trip was to attend the GoBlockchainConnect conference, the first big conference connecting the Asian and North American blockchain industries. The conference was promoted as bringing together developers, blockchain companies, and investors. More than 1'000 people attended.

Such events are really good for getting the pulse of the crypto community first hand, learning about the state of art in this emerging industry, and connecting with key people, including projects like NEO, and companies like... Google (yes, you read it correctly...more info about that below). ;-)

One of the best sessions we saw was Riccardo Spagni, lead developer of Monero. He had good things to say, and presented himself well. We learned, very quickly, that there is a wide gap in the blockchain space between those who have real substance in product or knowledge, and those who don't.

We had a chance to pitch Red/C3 project to Charlie Lee, Litecoin's creator. He found it promising and asked if Litecoin's VM could be supported. As Litecoin is using an instruction set compatible with Bitcoin's Script, he was glad to hear that such support was already on our roadmap.

We also booked a meeting with NEO (a Chinese competitor of Ethereum, basically) at the conference. When we met NEO's team, including Da HongFei, founder of NEO, and Johnson Zhao, their Global Development Director, it went so well that they asked us to attend the NEO DevCon in SF two days later, and have Nenad on a panel about smart contract programming. That panel was a resounding success for Red. Where NEO plans to support C#, Python, JS, and more for blockchain programming, it was clear that DSLs are what everyone really wants for smart contracts.

Now, about the big "G" company. :-) We were lucky to meet a Google manager and engineer at the GoBlockchainConnect conference, and talked with them several times about Red and our plans for covering smart contracts and Dapp development. They just happened to be the two people in charge of the internal blockchain group at Google, and found Red intriguing enough to invite us for a full demo at Google's HQ in Mountain View! The demo went very well, they were astonished by what Red could do already, and how we leverage dialects (eDSLs) to reduce complexity, especially in the UI domain. It quickly turned into a brainstorming session about the possible applications of Red and /C3 in the blockchain industry, and disruptive potential to traditional markets. This resulted in a further invitation to present Red to a much larger internal group at Google, as soon as we have a working prototype for smart contract coding. Do we need to emphasize the potential of such interest by big G? ;-)

Photos taken at the entrance of Google's offices, taking shots inside is strictly forbidden.

In light of all the new potential in the Silicon Valley, we are planning to open an office in the Bay Area, as soon as possible, and recruit a team there.

Even with the ETH we raised, it's all we can afford in SV. ;-)

It was a long week, with long hours, but well worth it in the end. We learned that Red is in a very solid position, and because we're able to move quickly, our chances of success are good. We have a much longer history than other projects out there, though our blockchain strategy is a new aspect. We have real, solid technology that works today, and that's huge. Our community (growing up over 7 years) is also one of our great strengths, and putting things in motion to make use of RED tokens to thank and reward you is near the top of our priority list.

Next article will be published tomorrow, and will talk about our meeting with Carl. ;-)

RED Token Sale Success!

Dear RED supporters,

We did it!

I’d like to thank you, and the entire Red community, for supporting us throughout this token sale process. We know that you've waited patiently for new features and releases while we worked on it. We’re thrilled that so many of you are excited about using Red, the upcoming tools we'll build together, and using RED tokens in the community. Blockchain based "tokenomics" is a new and exciting world of possibilities that we can help create, together.

In the past month, since RED’s debut, there has been overwhelming interest in our token sale. We deeply appreciate that support, from all parts of the world.

We can now confidently embark on the next steps in Red's development, thanks to each and every one of you. The establishment of the Red Foundation and the development of Red/C3 are top priorities, but this doesn't mean all the other work stops. The success of the RED token sale means we can redouble our efforts, moving forward in greater strides, knowing we're on solid ground. Your support means more opportunities for the Red community to contribute and be properly acknowledged. Yes, we have a lot of work and planning to do, but we have a strong, clear vision and deep desire to see it through. The wheels are already in motion and I look forward to letting you know each time we complete a major milestone.

We are so grateful, more than we can say, to have such a supportive (and growing) community around us. On behalf of the entire RED team, I want to share our appreciation for you all, and I personally want to thank each of you for loving and believing in Red.

To Red's future, our future!

Registration Special Offer

Dear Red users and followers,

Thank you all for your genuine interest in Red, we greatly appreciate it.

We have received overwhelming requests and a very high number of documents for the registration.

It is the contributions from each and every one of you that makes Red great, and we thank you very much for your strong support. During that time, I was giving a speech at the FINWISE 2018 conference in Macau, as part of our road show for introducing Red to the blockchain community.

We set up strict rules for the acceptation process in order to secure it as best as possible. So we want to take the time to carefully review each provided document.

This is what we propose for those of you who submitted valid KYC verification information before UTC 7:30am, January 12th 2018, and could not participate to early bird round:

    1. We will send you a confirmation email informing you about your successful registration.

    2. You will then be whitelisted (all at once) and be able to buy the remaining RED tokens from the early birds supply, and at the upcoming open round.

   3. For those of you who could not participate to early bird round, but submitted the valid KYC before UTC 7:30am, January 12th 2018, and who will be buying during the open round, we will refund you 10% of the ETH amount you sent (you will be keeping all the RED tokens you will get), effectively giving you the same conversion ratio as during the early birds round.

We hope this is a satisfying solution and will make things right for those who could not participate yesterday.

The open round starts on UTC 8am January 16th. Get ready! ;-)

RED: here we go!

After long weeks of hard work, we are finally ready and happy to announce the opening of the token sales! We had to rename the token to RED (all caps), as an RCT token was deployed by another project a few days ago. Its purpose is still unchanged: powering the decentralized apps and Red community tokenomics!

This process will be held starting from January 8th to January 31st 2018, in three stages:

  Private Angel Investors       : Jan  8th - Jan 11th
  Early Bird round              : Jan 12th - Jan 15th
  Open round                    : Jan 16th - Jan 31th

The total fixed supply of RED tokens is 200,000,000. The allocations are:

  Private investors             : 10% (20,000,000) with a 3 months lockup period.
  ICO (earlybird + open rounds) : 30% (60,000,000)
  Red team                      : 15% (30,000,000) with a 12 months lockup period.
  Red Foundation                : 35% (70,000,000)
  Marketing/Strategic           : 10% (20,000,000)

Exchange ratios with Ethers (ETH) are set as:

  Private Investors             : 1 ETH => 3400 RED
  Early Birds                   : 1 ETH => 2750 RED
  Open round                    : 1 ETH => 2500 RED

Only Ethers are accepted, with a minimum of 1 ETH. Private angel investors also benefit from a 20% unlocking at the closing date of the token sales process.

In order to participate, you will need to go through an online registration process (KYC), and provide the required credentials. Citizens of countries that have banned or posed heavy regulations on such token sales are not allowed to participate.

For more information about the token sales:

• Website
• RED whitepaper
• Telegram group
• Gitter red/blockchain room (for technical discussions)
• Twitter
• Facebook

This is the culminating point of many months of hard work and preparation. Many thanks to the teams and partners who have worked over the clock to make this happen. This is the dawn of new era for Red and its community of contributors, users and followers. Help us make it happen now!

Go RED!

Overview of Red development history

This video shows a fast-paced timelapse of the Red source code changes in the main repository over last 6 years, 9000 commits. You can see the avatars of all contributors, flashing commits on the files over time.

Here are a few stats showing the changes between Jan 1st 2017 and Dec 31th 2017:

• Github stars: 1214 to 2970
• Github programming languages ranking: #34 to #22
• Page views on red-lang.org: 1.06M to 1.65M

As you can see, 2017 has been a great year, with interest in Red growing for some stats, faster than in all the previous years put together!

Short history of Red

Given that many newcomers arrived in Red community in the last two years, some might be confused about past Red history and timeline, so I would like to write it down now, and add some comments in retrospect on some of the choices made in the past.

The Red project was officially launched in March 2011, with the first public announcement and the release of the version 0.1.0, which was developed in 3 months. That early version provided a fully working Red/System toolchain, with a compiler and linker, all in 60KB of source code. That was just for Red/System, the low-level DSL of Red.

The Red language had different goals at that time, it was meant to be a statically typed sub-set of Rebol, with static scopes and no dynamic binding. That Red would have been only compiled, so no interpreter, and would eventually had a REPL after 1.0, once a JIT was available. Given my old work on an experimental Rebol clone in C a few years ago (implemented in 9 months), I estimated that a 1.0 for such Red could be doable in a year. Such a version would only support Windows and x86 architecture, would have most, but not all of Rebol datatypes, no DSL, no GUI nor floating point support.

During 2011, a community of users and followers started forming around this early Red version, the daily interactions with the community had some influence on the goals I had initially set for Red, and at some point during that year, I realized that what I really wanted was a more dynamic language, closer to Rebol, rather than a crippled static version. I decided then to trace a new longer road to a different design for Red, more in line with my personal desires and community expectations.

The scope extended as we kept adding new features (sometimes initiated by contributors), like ARM support, floating point support and Parse dialect. We then replaced the early low-level lexer with a much more capable version using Parse. The community was pressuring for a more "production-ready" version, which meant adding more features, like extra datatypes, postponing the 1.0 milestone further away up to 2014.

I have been working full-time on the project since 2011, and invested all my personal money to fund it, helped by individual donations from community members. Frankly, without those extra donations, I wouldn't have made it. In late 2013, I was contacted by a China-based VC (Innovation Works) who was interested by Red project. They offered me the chance to join them in Beijing. I initially politely refused, as I thought that doing so would consume too much time and accepting investments never has a guaranteed outcome. But thinking more about it, I also considered that raising a seed round would allow some talents in the community to work full time on Red, speeding it up. So, I accepted the offer and relocated to Beijing in 2014, settling for a new life there.

Red in its command-line form was not good enough to attract any investor, nor make any good business plan. So I made a major decision to incorporate the GUI module in the roadmap as soon as possible. The original plan was to only add it after Red had reached version 1.0. I also thought that Android support would be a key element for Red's future, so I also move it forward too. It took me about 7 months to raise a seed round, and 4 more months to effectively get the money into the bank account of the newly formed company in mid-2015. Work on Red during that time went more slowly. It never stopped though as we could hire our first developers (using a loan) and the number of contributors from the community was increasing.

A new roadmap was set and a 1.0 was planned for 2016 focusing on Android GUI support. Though, the early prototype on Android showed that developing a cross-platform GUI engine starting with Android (as we wanted it asap) along with the VID DSL was not a good way to achieve it, as the development cycle with Android was too long, and debugging at low-level there was very limited and painful. It was way more convenient to do it on a desktop OS like Windows, which was also the platform of roughly half of our users. So we switched the GUI development to Windows first, as it would be much faster to design and polish the cross-platform parts there, then make an Android back-end for it after.

The GUI engine with the VID dialect and back-end for Windows was released in early 2016. We initially planned only a minimal support and just a few (5-6) widgets for the Windows back-end, but the community wanted more (and still does). At the same time, we were also working in parallel on a Red IDE engine based on Scintilla. We needed more widget support, so we spent extra months doubling the initial number of widgets and polishing the features of VID, Draw dialect and View engine. The Scintilla IDE prototype was not as promising as we expected, some limitations with Scintilla were disappointing to say the least. They included awkward Unicode support and UI limitations. A Red GUI based IDE was a better option, allowing us to support any feature we could think of. We ran out of resources for such a side-project, so we put it to sleep until we can fund it (hint hint, the ICO would help there a lot too!).

After the initial GUI release, before we went back to Android support, we had to do some promotion about Red and our new shiny GUI system, in order to increase our userbase  (growth is a constant concern for VC-backed startups). Though, the competition was rough, as the new state of the art (on the web) was reactive frameworks which were providing a more powerful and simpler way to operate GUIs. Such reactive GUI was also something I had on my wish-list since 2010 for Red, and it seemed like the right time to add it, so that's what we did and released it in mid-2016. That enabled the production of some pretty impressive demos I think, for a cross-platform native GUI system.

We went back to Android development after that, starting by adding a preprocessor to Red lexer, in order to move a lot of costly work done at runtime to resolve Java method signatures, to compile-time. This work consumed around a couple of months, especially as we also took that opportunity to add an experimental macro system. The preprocessor is currently used by the Red runtime to reduce code size, though, we late figured out a better way to handle the Java method signatures  without relying on the preprocessor. So, we could have saved some time there, even if it's always easier to come to such conclusion when looking back in time.

As we continued on Android support, we stumbled upon new unexpected issues. All the features added in the last releases significantly increased the runtime size, resulting in very long compilation times. Moreover, the GUI system and newest object features broke the ability for the Red compiler to produce functioning shared library files for Red programs (Red/System shared libraries were fine, it was a limitation of the Red runtime library and compiler). We then decided to launch the "libRed" branch, in order to solve all those issues by enabling the compilation of the Red runtime as a shared library in two different forms: one is libRedRT, used only for speeding up the compilation process, the other is libRed, which provides an external API for embedding Red into external software (which was on our todo-list anyway and in the Red initial goals). That work took more time than expected, roughly 7 months, as I had to travel across the globe many times (for personal reasons) going offline for a total of 2 months during that period, which made it harder to properly focus on some of the complex issues that needed solving. That is where we lost the most time in the last couple of years, although the macOS GUI branch was still advancing at the same time in parallel.

After macOS release earlier this year, we could finally continue the work on Android, and guess what, we could develop a GUI backend on par with Windows one in about a month and half only! All the preparation work done before was paying off in the end! Still, that is not enough for acceptable Android support, as mobile devices have many features which need first-class support, and we are working on them for 0.6.5 release (delayed by the ICO preparations and process). We will provide more info about Android support very soon.

Another important consequence of adding GUI support for macOS, was the need to have a GUI console there too (identical to the Windows one), as we have great plans for the GUI console itself. As a side-project, we started working on a new GUI console engine in early 2017, replacing the low-level OS-specific Red/System bindings with the Red/View engine, enabling cross-platform support out of the box, and adding some key features we needed on the Red roadmap, like rich-text support. Those features are available in our 0.6.4 branch, and will be part of the next release shortly after the ICO (though probably after Chinese New Year in february).

One thing I have greatly underestimated during all those years (especially at the beginning), was the amount of time that would be spent interacting with the community, as I tried to be as present as possible online to answer questions, welcome newcomers and help them get started. My public posts are just the tip of the iceberg, as many people just contacted me on direct channels (email, private messages on AltME, Gitter, skype, ...), and that consumed a lot of time too. But, I think it was a necessity anyway, just unaccounted for. Nowadays it is much easier for me, as we have community managers and many other members who are doing a great job handling newcomers, wave after wave. Another thing I didn't consider at the beginning was also how much impact and influence the community would have on the features that we would put into Red (especially pre-1.0). As old-timers from Rebol community were used to have a great amount of feature available out of the box, they expected Red to be on par with that, often without much concern about the costs involved in supporting the desired features. I think I should have said "no" more often than I did, or just postponing them after 1.0.

All in all, despite the bumpy road sometimes, the current version of Red is better in many ways than what I hoped for in 2011. We still have the option to rename the 0.7.0 or 0.7.1 upcoming milestones to a 1.0 candidate, as they would have all the features we initially planned for a 1.0, though there are pros and cons about pushing the other planned features post-1.0, but I understand that Red users nowadays are more interested in reaching a 1.0, than having a more feature-complete one. We can discuss about that on our Gitter channels.

This is a (very) short version of the Red history, there is so much more to say about it, maybe someday when I will have some spare time, I'll write down the whole thing in a book, including my views on language design, and all the non-tech related side stories. ;-)

Cheers!

Answers to community questions

After our announcement, we already answered on Gitter some questions related to this new sub-project of Red that we are launching. The remaining new questions are answered below.


ICO-related questions

Do you have an estimate how long establishing that foundation will take, couple weeks?

We expect it to be officially set up before the end of January (if not delayed by extra paperwork). We are setting it up in Paris, France.

Why choose ICO instead of traditional funding schemes (Patreon, donations, etc)?

That's a good question. In 2015, we already raised a seed round for the company supporting the development of Red (Fullstack Technologies), though that is far from enough in order to move faster, as the scope of the project keeps growing. Individual donations were enough 5 years ago, when the project was in its infancy, but that level of funding is not capable of sustaining the project in its current form since a long time.

What is plan B if the ICO is not successful?

In such case, Red/C3 will drop low in priority as we won't be able to fund the work on it, and the Red foundation will have no mean to operate and help Red project and community. We would then focus on our core roadmap and unroll our business plan for the Red core technology only. The ICO is a better path, not just for funding the whole Red project further, but because the blockchain market is a big new opportunity for the Red stack, and we should seize it in order to grow up faster and much bigger. Moreover, introducing a token-based economy in the Red platform would open many new business opportunities, both for our company, and for the Red users.

All other ICO-related questions will be answered once we set up the landing page for the ICO, with the published whitepaper and adequate communication channels. All that is under heavy work right now, we should be ready in about a week from now.


Blockchain

Any plans to run a private NEO blockchain?

That is something we are considering, yes. Though we have many other possible choices. We should meet with the NEO council in 2018, so we will be able to investigate that option deeper with them.

Are there plans for Red to support IPFS?

Clearly yes. That can happen just after 0.7.0 release with full I/O support, though this could be contributed by the community (with sponsoring from the Red foundation), it doesn't need to be implemented by the core team.


Red/Core

How is Red sustained, who currently supports it?

Red is sustained by its supporting company, Fullstack Technologies, who received a seed investment in 2015, and by contributors on a daily basis. Previously, Red was funded by my personal money and donations from users.

Is stuff like concurrency also required to reach 1.0, and be used on blockchains? 

We plan to have a form of async tasks support for 1.0. There are several models we could use, Actor is our prefered model so far, but the final choice is not done yet. For parallelism, that will be for a 1.x.

Is interop with other mainstream libraries/languages (java, python, c#, go,...) planned?

LibRed can be used for that. We have a few bindings already. For Java, we have built a bridge a few years ago. That bridge has been improved in our new Android branch (currently private). For Python, Go and other languages, it's up to the community to plug libRed there, if needed.

You said that the current Red roadmap will be delayed by a few weeks. You don't think it will be much more with all activities created by this big move?

We plan to resume on our normal roadmap as soon as the ICO is done, so by finishing and releasing Red 0.6.4. The new branch of development will have its own roadmap and dedicated resources (hopefully paid by the money raised through the ICO). My personal time will be split between the core parts (including Android) and the blockchain branch.

Giving recent announcement, it seems that Red drifts further and further from initial idea of Carl. Building blockchain tech without proper GC, or 64 bit support and just basic I/O. And it's worrisome that "full-stack language" and its community may lock itself in one niche. Can you comment on that?

On the contrary, Red goes closer to the original idea of Carl, of a "messaging" language and distributed computing through IOS reblets (the X-internet), as explained by our announcement article. The blockchain technology helps improve such architecture, by allowing it to operate in a decentralized way. For the rest, the GC branch is almost finished and should be available in 0.6.4 release. 64-bit support is not a top priority right now, as 32-bit apps can run on all our current target platforms, so it is more of a convenience for some users. We know that some OS vendors are planning to restrict their platform, so we will set up a path to go 64-bit, though it will take some time to get there. For the record, "blockchain tech" and GC/64-bit are totally unrelated features and are not even on the same roadmap.

About "locking itself in one niche", that makes no sense, the announcement article says "in a new branch of the Red project". So the project is expanding to cover more domains, and not restricting itself in a niche.

Following both planned Red roadmap and doing Red/C3 in one project... isn't it too ambitious?

As explained in previous answers, Red/C3 is a sub-project of Red, with dedicated resources. There is a great opportunity for Red in the blockchains right now, targeting smart contracts and Dapps. Red is a great fit for the needs in that market. That is a great opportunity to expand Red userbase and spread Red around.

That is all for now, if you have more questions, please ask them in red/red or red/blockhain rooms.


Happy New Year to all the Reducers in the World! 2018 will be an exciting year for all of us! ;-)

Leaping into the future: Red goes blockchain!

Here we are, ready to leap into the future. This is a new page opening in the Red history book. It is a great day for us to finally be able to share with everyone some great news for Red and its community. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride! ;-)

Why the blockchain?

Unless you just woke up from prolonged hibernation under Artic ice crust, you cannot miss the hype around blockchains and their related coins. If you are new to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, let me give you the simple bird view on that: speculation on cryptocurrencies is currently very high, but whether it is a bubble or not, bursting soon or never, is not really relevant. The important part, shadowed by the coins market hype, is that the blockchain technologies are a new infrastructure that should help solve many issues we have. It is a missing piece that we need in order to rebalance the modern Internet landscape, and bring back the decentralization that was once promised in the early Internet days.

Though, the impact of such disruptive change goes way beyond just Internet infrastructure (for example, IPFS or Storj), it has the potential to reshape many industries (see the Brave browser and its Basic Attention Token, bringing a saner alternative to online advertisement) and human activities, including in our daily lives. We are currently still just seeing the first generation of blockchains. Those pioneers have inefficiencies, like scalability and power consumption issues, though, after following and studying the evolution of blockchains during a year, I am now confident enough that those issues will be solved in a not-too-distant future by the next wave of blockchains (or upgraded versions of existing ones). For example, zero-knowledge proof and especially the non-interactive variant are really impressive and promising approaches.

So, how does Red fit there?

As Red aims to be a fullstack programming solution, we naturally look at what are the potential next big platforms we should support. Since last year, we are watching and studying the various blockchains, especially focusing on the ones supporting smart contracts, Ethereum being the leading chain in that domain. Basically, it is like a distributed computer, where you can run arbitrary sandboxed code, using the distributed ledger as its database. There are a few programming languages which can be used to implement those smart contracts, but Solidity is the default one now for such tasks. If you are a Red follower, you know how much we care about simplicity and efficiency in our programming tools. Well, those concerns do not seem to be shared by people who created the existing tools for smart contracts coding and testing. Let's put it bluntly, the current state is a nightmare. It takes several hours, up to a full day to just figure out and set up a development environment the first time, even for a senior developer. The sheer complexity in such toolchains is really high. The Remix initiative is still young, but it is a lifesaver compared to other existing toolchains. Still, you have to put up with a language that has many questionable design choices, for coding contracts which could handle billions of dollars worth of assets. Guess what happens under such conditions.

So, there is a huge need for a better, much simpler and safer contract development tool. We know that Red can deliver such solution, because that's our fight and our mission since the first release of Rebol 20 years ago. Still, people who work with me know how skeptical I am. So it took me several months of studying and discussions to figure out where and how Red could help in that domain.

Why now?

We are at an early point of a new revolution.We do know that much better development tools are needed, and the current offer is poor and disappointing to say the least. We know that we can provide a great solution based on Red, in an acceptable timeframe. This is an amazing opportunity, like we haven't seen since late 90's and the rise of the world wide web. This is our time now.

So this is what we will build, in a new branch of the Red project:

Red/C3

A new Red dialect (DSL) whose code-name is Red/CCC (Cross Chain Code) or just Red/C3, for smart contracts programming. Such dialect will compile to the Ethereum VM (EVM) bytecode directly as first target, and more backends will be added later to support other chains, like NEO. We are at the design stage, the first alpha (prototype) is planned for end of Q1 2018. Our current design involves a combination of two small languages:

• A very high-level layer: a symbolic and highly declarative language with restricted computing semantics and restricted control flow (turing-incomplete), reading mostly like natural language (compared to mainstream languages). Coarse-grained code produced at this level by the compiler will exhibit higher safety, close to the level provided by templates, while still providing much greater flexibility. An intelligent visual program builder will also be considered for pre-generating such code.

• A lower-level layer: a general-purpose, statically typed, subset of Red language.

Moreover, for testing such contracts, we plan to create:

• a simulator for the EVM (and later for other chains VM) coded in Red/System for fast performances.

• a generative testing environment, for auto-testing user contracts extensively in addition to manually written tests using a simple testing framework we will provide too.

• a GUI interface to handle all that in an easy way, without requiring deep knowledge of the blockchain infrastructure.

The toolchain will be an extension of the current Red toolchain, so it will be a standalone binary of 1-2MB.

Red Dapps

Smart contracts are used to power what is called Decentralized Apps (Dapps)-- Basically a user-facing application operating on blockchains through smart contracts. Currently such Dapps are built using web stacks, but still need to connect to a blockchain node in order to interact with it. Light nodes could help solve that, but they break the decentralization model. So, in order to facilitate the deployment of the required blockchain nodes, such apps are often wrapped in a standalone native installer using an Electron framework. This results in big downloads (50-150MB) and big memory usages inherent to web stacks.

The Red stack, with its ~1MB runtime (~300KB if compressed) can provide a much better alternative, and Red GUI capabilities can lower drastically the entrance barrier and costs for coding apps and Dapps. In order to achieve that, we need to add a blockchain node connector in our runtime library, preferably wrapping a node in C library form, though using JSON-RPC is also an option.

For old Rebolers, maybe you remember Rebol/IOS in early 2000's, for handling the X-Internet? Well, guess what? Carl was right all along (as usual). ;-) You can look at the Red Dapps as a modern blockchain-powered incarnation of that concept!

What about the existing Red roadmap?

The Red core language development continues with the same roadmap, we are just delaying a bit the 0.6.4 and 0.6.5 releases, in order to pass the big wave of changes in the incoming weeks. In order to achieve that, while opening a new branch of development, we need to grow bigger and structure the whole thing differently. Here are the plans to move the whole project to the next stage:

Red Foundation

We were thinking about that since last year, but now is the right time to do it for many reasons. We need a dedicated organization to handle the community and contributors' efforts for the work on Red core language. We also have plans for business activities, and it would be easier to separate the teams working on the open-source project and the ones working on commercial products and services. It is not an unseen set up, the Clojure project structured itself in a similar way.

So, we have filed an application to set up a Red Foundation in France, and will transfer to it the rights and governance for the open source parts of Red. The managers of that structure will be: Gregg Irwin, Peter W A Wood, François Jouen and myself, for starting. The foundation has a complex job and will require resources to operate, hence:

Red community 2.0: RCT token

We are embracing the blockchain philosophy fully and will empower the Red users and community using a decentralized organization (DAO), supported by a new ERC20 token called Red Community Token (RCT). There is no other programming language or tool that I have heard of, attempting to move their existing community to a DAO, so we will be exploring uncharted territories there, and setting an example for others to follow. The foundation will be setting up the rules with the help of the community, for the usages of the RCT token. Some of the target usages for the token holders, will include:

• voting rights: influence the Red roadmap, vote for features and issue tickets.

• tipping: useful chat posts, code contributions, learning materials providers, etc.

• intra-community cryptoeconomics (or rather tokenomics): selling/buying services from other community members (coding tasks, consulting, learning help, bug fixing, decentralized gaming, etc.)

• paid Dapps, or in-app purchases.

In addition to that, the foundation will hold a significant amount of RCT, which will be used for rewarding:

• code contributions

• Red-related online learning or presenting materials (blog, documentations, etc.)

• promotional actions (presenting Red at a conference)

• any other actions that will help spread Red and make the community grow up. 

There will be an initial distribution of RCT tokens to the existing Red contributors (once the foundation defines the rules and allocation amounts), that will retro-actively cover existing contributions (like merged PR, tickets resulting in code changes, past donations, etc.).

Last but not least, the RCT might be used in the future as a gas token, to pay for cross-chain different gas currencies, or to power a future Red's own blockchain.

Those are just scratching the surface of the possibilities that such token and DAO (powered by smart contracts) could open. This gives you an idea of the disruptive potential of blockchains, when rightly used. It is not yet clear how far we can go into the decentralized model, it is something we will explore all together (we'll set up dedicated chat rooms on Gitter and other sites for that).

This will be our greatest challenge, but I trust we have enough brain power in the Red foundation and community to figure out the best rules for a healthy organization.

Initial coin offering

In order to kickstart the RCT token, and fund all the resources needed to accomplish the above tasks and roadmap, we need to raise some money. Initial Coin Offering (ICO) are the new way to achieve that. I have been reluctant to do that for a while, given how young and controversial it can be (the amount of scams in that domain is really high), but after studying many other ICO, I am convinced now that this is not just a short-lived fad, but a real new model to fund projects, and especially open-source projects related to blockchains.

We have produced a whitepaper earlier this year in October (co-authored by Tamas Herman and myself), to describe with more details and context what we are building. We will release it publicly in a few days.

The ICO itself should be held in early January 2018, starting with an angel round, then pre-sale and open rounds following right after. A new website will be available in a few days, giving the full information required for the ICO.

The ICO should provide us with enough funds to cover all the needs for this ambitious roadmap. A job list will be available after it, as we hope to hire the best profiles from the Red community, so update your CV and clean-up the source code of your Red apps. ;-)

Final words

These are intense and exciting days for us and the Red community, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and have a good beer, maybe someday you'll pay it on your smartphone with a Red Dapp powered by RCT tokens. ;-)

Cheers!