When comparing Red/System vs Lobster, the Slant community recommends Lobster for most people. In the question“What are the best modern, compiled, garbage collected and minimalistic programming languages for developing fast, reliable desktop applications productively?” Lobster is ranked 3rd while Red/System is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Lobster is:
Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Built-in support for concurrency
Red has built-in support for concurrency and multi-core CPUs.
Pro Compile time reference counting
Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer.
Pro Python-esque syntax
There's an audience who loves that.
Pro WebAssembly backend
More options for users.
Pro Inline structs
Structs are allocated in their parent, and come at zero overhead.
Pro Automatic memory management
Better than Rust. No sadism.
Pro Type inference algorithm
Just works. Goes further than most languages in terms of allowing code without types.
Cons
Con Doesn't work on 64-bit OSes
Still hasn't upgraded to be 64-bit OS compatible.
Con Not ready for production
Red is still on version 0.6.0. Which means that it still has some way to go before being used in production and in large projects.
Con Small community
Lead doesn't appear to be so ambitious or has a vision to push making more popular.
Con Compile time reference counting not 100%
Around 5% of time, need to escape to runtime reference counting. Working to get the percentage as low as possible.
Con Lobster not yet totally written in Lobster
Core written in C++. Plans to change that, but has been a long time.
Con Python-like syntax, but different use case and domain
Not Python compatible and often significantly different in purpose and use cases.