This new release is bringing a lot of important bug fixes and some new features for Red/System. The new PRINT function might break some existing scripts, but should be easily fixable.

New features

• Variable-arguments function support
• RTTI function limited support
• Polymorphic and variadic PRINT function
• Command-line arguments access
• Added stack low-level manipulation native functions: push, pop
• Access to stack pointer and stack frame pointer (reading/writing)
• Subtracting two pointers is now possible
• Preprocessor improved to solve macros recursively
• New built-in hexdump debugging functions
• External library access unit tests (thanks to Peter)

PRINT function examples:

print 123 
123 

print "hello" 
hello 

print [123 "hello"] 
123hello 

print [123 tab "hello" lf "world" lf] 
123    hello 
world 

a: 1 < 2 
b: "hello" 
print [a tab b/2] 
true    e

Bugfixes

• Complex arithmetic expressions involving pointers, path access and type casting are now much more reliable. 89 new unit tests were written to help fix the bugs and track regressions.
• Complete list of fixed issues available in Github’s tracker.

Specification document

• Updated to match all new and changed features

Red runtime

• Memory allocator implemented in Red/System, documentation is pending.

As you can see, no vacation this summer for Red project!

This release is mainly a bugfix release that solves several old issues. It is also now correctly synchronized with all the current bindings done for Red/System. The main changes are:

• Internal compiler refactoring of: expressions compilation, type casting and ANY/ALL support.
• Greatly improved runtime error reporting: now it reports both source line number and source file name where the error occured. It works in debug mode only (-g command-line option).
• Aliased struct names can now be tested separately in typed (RTTI) functions.
• Callback function attribute removed. It is no more needed and any function can now be used as a callback. In addition a new cdecl attribute is now accepted to allow the switch to C calling convention, when passing a function as argument to an imported C function.
• 21 issue reports closed.
• More than 2000 new unit tests were added (mostly generated using scripts wrote by Peter WA Wood) for a total of now 8613 tests.

This is a mainly a bug fixing release with several issues and bugs in float numbers handling solved.

In addition to that:

• Libc is now much better integrated with Red/System, the __libc_start_main C internal initialization function is now correctly handled by Red/System on all supported platforms. This ensures that all libraries relying heavily on C will now work as well as if called from a C program. Thanks to Andreas for the nights spent on digging and debugging that.
• The IA-32 floats backend has been improved to keep last float value in FPU rather than passing it to CPU. This change not only simplifies the backend code emitter but also reduces significantly the generated code size for floats. As a side effect, float-intensive programs are now twice as fast as with v0.2.4. The same change could be applied to ARM backend, but with less gains as ARM can easily transfer data between CPU and FPU, as opposed to IA-32 architecture, which requires an intermediary step through memory when using x87 FPU.

By the way, that’s our first birthday (technically ten days ago) since Red project was announced for the first time at the ReBorCon 2011 conference in Amsterdam. The initial schedule has been changed several times since then, to better adapt to the very rapid changes that are occurring in the computing world (massive move to mobile devices to name the main one).

After 900+ commits and thanks to all the contributors, we now have solid foundations to build upon, much better than what I expected to have, one year ago. The focus from now is getting the Red language layer up and running as soon as possible. A large window of opportunities is opening in 2012, so let’s not miss it!

Cheers!