MonoDevelop vs Red
When comparing MonoDevelop vs Red, the Slant community recommends MonoDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for making a cross-platform application?” MonoDevelop is ranked 6th while Red is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose MonoDevelop is:
MonoDevelop is free to download and use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
MonoDevelop is free to download and use.
Pro Starting up this program doesn't take as long as starting Visual Studio windows 98
Pro Simple toolchain
Other languages have complex, multi-step setups that beginners often get stuck on. Red has no installer, no setup, no dependencies*, just a single small (~1MB) command-line executable with both the compiler and repl. On Windows, you don't even have to launch executable from the command line--it has a GUI-console.
Pro Very simple syntax
Red syntax is a lot like Rebol. It's easier than most languages for beginners to pick up.
Pro Both low and high-level
Red has low enough access to do systems programming, but it's expressive enough for high-level scripting.
Pro Low cognitive load
Red has very simple syntax that's easy to learn. It gets out of your way and lets you think about the problem instead, enhancing productivity.
Cons
Con No longer supported (deprecated since 2018)
Starting with version 4.x, Xamarin rebranded MonoDevelop as Xamarin Studio, but only for the Windows version of the IDE.
Stable release
7.6.9.22 / September 21, 2018
Con Bad formatting
MonoDevelop doesn't offer much in terms of autocompletion and code formatting. Most of the time the automatic formatting that MonoDevelop does is annoying and not really compliant with C# guidelines.
Con The MonoDevelop version that ships with Unity is several versions behind
The version of MonoDevelop that ships with Unity is several versions behind the main MonoDevelop branch. It also gets updated very rarely so any annoying bugs that it may have take a lot of time to get fixed.
Con Not production ready
Red is still under development and not considered stable.
Con Still in beta
It mostly works. It's good enough for building usable applications, but some planned features are missing.