Warning
We are in the process of converting over to a new documentation publishing system. Some documents are not entirely correct yet. We’ve retained links to the ‘Old HTML’ where relevant. These will be going away in the near future.
Just getting started with Open Dylan? We recommend that you read the Introduction to Dylan to get a feel for the language. After that, you can broaden your knowledge with the Dylan Programming book.
These are some lengthier reference materials. While they make for dry reading, they're full of invaluable information!
Featured articles and blog postings.
Whereas dynamic typing enables rapid prototyping and easy experimentation, static typing provides early error detection and better compile time optimization. Gradual typing provides the best of both worlds. This paper shows how to define and implement gradual typing in Dylan, traditionally a dynamically typed language. Dylan poses several special challenges for gradual typing, such as multiple return values, variable-arity methods and generic functions (multiple dispatch).
In this paper Dylan is extended with function types and parametric polymorphism. We implemented the type system and a unification-based type inference algorithm in the mainstream Dylan compiler. As case study we use the Dylan standard library (roughly 32000 lines of code), which witnesses that the implementation generates faster code with fewer errors. Some previously undiscovered errors in the Dylan library were revealed.
Notes and materials useful to those working on Open Dylan itself or those who have an interest in the low level details.
This is old documentation that we don't plan to bring forward. Let us know if there's interest in this material.
