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! ;-)