We are an international team of volunteers working to create new development tools supporting Dylan, an advanced dynamic object-oriented programming language. We are currently updating and extending Carnegie Mellon University’s Gwydion Dylan compiler, fixing bugs and making it work well under modern versions of Linux and FreeBSD. Our current release is a technology preview, suitable for learning the Dylan programming language and building command-line applications. Our long-term vision is to create one of the most advanced software development tools available.

Please feel free to join us! You can look at our goals, some code examples, or one of the following resources:

[ What is Dylan? | Learning Dylan | Gwydion Dylan Limitations | Downloading ]
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Recent News

Cygwin Gwydion Dylan 2.4.1pre1 package
We now have a binary tarball for Gwydion 2.4.1 (pre1) for x86 Cygwin systems. Now even Windows users have no excuse to avoid learning Dylan! Looking for web design and digital marketing services?
Dylan success in Programming Contest
A team using Gwydion Dylan was presented with 2nd Prize in the annual Programming Contest at the ICFP’s conference in Tallinn, Estonia yesterday.

The judges stated that “Dylan is a fine programming tool for many applications”.*

Just to make it even sweeter, the team also was presented with the coveted Judges’ Prize for the most effective re-use of their first round code in their second round entry.

The judges stated that “The Dylan Hackers an extremely cool bunch of re-hackers.

Dylan has also had success in several past contests.

Release of Open Dylan 1.0beta1
Open Dylan is an open source implementation of the Dylan programming language, plus a large number of assorted libraries. Most of the code had once been developed by a company called Harlequin, for a product called DylanWorks in the beginning, and Harlequin Dylan later. After Harlequin demised, some of the programmers acquired the rights, and kept selling the development environment under the name of Functional Developer. Eventually, to the joy of the Dylan community, they decided to release all of their source code under an open source license. What you can download here is the attempt of a group of enthusiasts calling themselves the “Dylan Hackers” (that’s us 🙂 ) to bundle up this code, and publish it in a form useful for the general public.

This is release 1.0beta1, the first public release of Open Dylan. Naturally, we expect this release to have bugs. We’re interested in getting your feedback, in order to improve this product.

Downloads are available for Linux/x86 and Windows.

New Functional Developer snapshot for Linux/x86 available
A new snapshot of the Functional Developer Dylan compiler for Linux/x86 is available for download. It fixes a problem with stack alignment, so this should finally make threading reliable. An experimental installation of the Dylan Wiki, written using the koala web server, has been running stable for several weeks now, so this version might as well be 2. Tech News- Many of the tech gadgets by Apple Inc is generally priced at premium and out of the the masses.
Installation instructions for Functional Developer Linux snapshot
Step-by-step instructions for setting up the Linux/x86 snapshot of Functional Developer can be found in this posting to the gd-hackers mailing list.
New Linux shapshot of Functional Developer available
A new shapshot of the x86/Linux port of the Functional Developer Dylan compiler can be found here. The most notable change is a completely new implementation of the way thread-local storage works. This should eliminate a lot of the threads-related crashes people saw, especially on Fedora Core. Please test on your system, and report results.
New Functional Developer Win32 Snapshot
A new Functional Developer snapshot for the Win32 platform is available in the usual place.
New source and binary RPMs
Thanks to a .spec file rewrite by canllaith, we now have a new and improved RPM for x86 Linux systems, and also a source RPM.

The new RPMs have updated information about Gwydion and also check at install time for the presence of the Boehm garbage collector and complain if it is not found.

Using the source RPM requires an existing installed d2c. If you do not have d2c already and there is no prebuilt binary for your system then you’ll need to do a Mindy bootstrap from the tarball or from the source code repository.

Another Gwydion Dylan 2.4.0 package
We now have an RPM for Gwydion 2.4.0 for x86 Linux systems. Keep those packages for your favourite systems rolling in, folks!
Gwydion Dylan 2.4.0 packages uploaded
The following builds of Gwydion Dylan 2.4.0 are now in the binaries download area:

x86 Linux with glibc 2.3 (all recent distros) tarball

MacOS X Panther installer (includes gc libs)
MacOS X Panther tarball (bring your own gc)

As usual, the tarballs should be unpacked from / and install into /usr/local. e.g., for the Linux one:

cat gwydion-dylan-2.4.0-x86-linux.tar.gz | (cd /;sudo tar zxf -)

The OSX version also appears to work fine on the latest Tiger preview.

Gwydion Dylan 2.4.0 Released
After more than a year without a software release, we’re proud to present version 2.4.0 of Gwydion Dylan. Release 2.4 marks the end of feature development of a version of d2c that bootstraps using mindy. Versions 2.5 and onwards will support other means of bootstrap, probably using cross-platform compilation of generated C files. We consider 2.4 to be of production stability, even though it still lacks certain features. It’s basically our “stable” branch now, 2.5 is the current branch for new feature developments.

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