[9] Red was introduced in the Netherlands in February 2011 at the Rebol & Boron conference[10] by its author Nenad Rakočević.

In September 2011, the Red programming language was presented to a larger audience during the Software Freedom Day 2011.

Red includes a dialect called Red/System, a C-level language which provides system programming facilities.

[7] Red is easy to integrate with other tools and languages as a DLL (libRed) and very lightweight (around 1 MB).

[7] Red also includes a fully reactive cross-platform GUI system based on an underlying reactive dataflow engine, a 2D drawing dialect comparable to SVG, compile-time and runtime macro support, and more than 40 standard datatypes.