Open Dylan

Dylan Programming Guide

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Dylan Programming Guide¶

The Dylan Programming Guide has been updated to use our new documentation format. As a result it is now available in PDF and ePub formats as well as much improved HTML.

The Dylan Programming Guide is a great introduction to programming in Dylan and was written by Neil Feinberg, Sonya E. Keene, Robert O. Matthews, and P. Tucker Withington while they were employed by Harlequin in the 1990s. The book covers everything from the basics up through advanced concepts such as Dylan macros and the condition system.

This was exported from the 1996-era Framemaker files and largely reformatted by hand. During this work, we also rewrote the lexer used in Pygments for processing and syntax highlighting Dylan source code. This new lexer will be available in the upcoming Pygments 1.6.

In the future, we will add some errata to the book to address some of the changes that have happened since the book was originally published.

We hope that this will be helpful in introducing a new generation of programmers to the Dylan programming language.

Open Dylan 2012.1 released

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0000

Open Dylan 2012.1 released¶

Dear Dylan Hacker,

It is a pleasure for us to finally announce a release of Open Dylan.

The last release with an announcement was 2011.1, in December, 2011. For a variety of reasons, we didn’t get to carry out our plan for more frequent releases in 2012, but hope to have more frequent releases in 2013.

While we have extensive release notes, there are some important changes that we feel are worth calling out separately:

We now use the C3 superclass linearization. See DEP-0003 for more details.
Multithreading now works in the C backend.
Binaries and libraries built by dylan-compiler no longer have their directory location hard-coded within the executables.
dylan-compiler places output into a local _build directory and can read from a local registry rather than relying on global directories.
Many bugs have been fixed, especially involving the usage of floats.
Linux and FreeBSD 32 bit builds have been updated to a new version of the Memory Pool System GC which is much faster and stable.
A new strings library has been provided which replaces the old strings and string-extensions libraries with a more consistent and straightforward API. string-extensions has been removed.
The command-line-parser library has been cleaned up and integrated with the Open Dylan distribution.
We no longer provide PowerPC builds of Open Dylan on Mac OS X. Also, our Intel builds are for Mac OS X Lion and later. If you desire Snow Leopard support, please get in touch with us.

Please report problems that you have in our issue tracker.

You can get it from our website, http://opendylan.org/download/. On Windows there is an installer, on UNIX systems unpack into /opt. On 64 bit Linux, you will need to have the Boehm GC installed for our executables to run. (Ubuntu: apt-get install libgc)

Good luck and happy Dylan hacking!

Improving Editor Support

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0000

Improving Editor Support¶

We have recently fixed some bugs in the syntax highlighting support for Textmate and Sublime Text as well as for vim.

Sublime Text and Textmate¶

Syntax highligting in Sublime Text

Textmate and Sublime Text used the same plugin which can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/dylan-lang/dylan.tmbundle.

Using Open Dylan specific modifiers (dynamic, sideways, etc) won’t break the highlighting.
locked and thread variable definitions are highlighted correctly now.
Keyword / header highlighting at the start of a file is improved.

Also, we’ve submitted a request for this plugin to be made available via Package Control for Sublime Text and hope that this is ready in the near future.

Vim¶

Syntax highlighting in vim

We extended the Dylan support of vim:

Improved comment handling such that all comments should be highlighted correctly now.
Improved operator highlighting.
Enabled spell checking for strings, comments and headers. To see this, you can toggle :set spell in vim.
Enabled highlighting for the built-in functions as defined in the DRM.

The files for vim can be found in https://github.com/dylan-lang/dylan-vim.

Patches and further improvements are welcome!

New command-line-parser Library

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0000

New command-line-parser Library¶

The command-line-parser library has been completely rewritten to

be far less verbose

have simplified usage

have automatic support for –help

be documented

Testworks and the HTTP server are using the new library. More enhancements coming soon.

New Strings Library

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0000

New Strings Library¶

A new library of basic string operations is now available as a standard library. The new strings library replaces most of the code in the old string-extensions library and provides a simpler and more consistent API. string-extensions will eventually be retired when the remainder of the code there is moved to the regular-expressions library, which is its only client.

C3 linearization

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0000

C3 linearization¶

We implemented the C3 superclass linearization algorithm in the Open Dylan compiler. This is more intuitive in some corner cases, and allows further performance improvements, especially compression of dispatch tables. It has been merged into the opendylan GitHub repository and will be the default in the next release (2012.1). A serious warning will be issued if the new C3 linearization is different from the old linearization specified in the DRM.

Further information is available in the accepted Dylan enhancement proposal here.

Development inside of Emacs using DIME

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:30:00 -0000

Development inside of Emacs using DIME¶

We have implemented a Dylan backend for DIME using the Open Dylan environment-protocols API to ease development of Dylan code on UNIX. At present, cross references, locating definitions, retrieving argument lists, compiling, warning reports and a class browser are implemented.

When successfully installed, just run M-x dime to get a shell. This is the same as the dylan-compiler shell, you can also use the same commands.

When you program and hit ( or , or (space), you get the argument list of the method you are calling.

M-x dime-dylan-browse-superclasses will show the superclass hierarchy of the current class. M-x dime-dylan-browse-subclasses displays the subclass hierarchy.

Keyboard shortcut	Effect
M-x dime	start dime
, change-project	select project (in the repl buffer)
M-.	jump to definition
M-,	jump backwards
C-c C-k	compile project
C-c C-w C-a	who specializes?
C-c C-w C-r	who references?
C-c C-w C-b	who binds?
C-c C-w C-c	who calls?

Dswank uses the Open Dylan project registry, so make sure OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES is set properly before starting Emacs.

DIME is a fork of SLIME.

Installation¶

You need the following pieces:

dylan-mode, and extend your ~/.emacs as documented in the README

dswank itself is shipped with the 2011.1 release

Open Dylan 2011.1 released

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:00:00 -0000

Open Dylan 2011.1 released¶

Dear Dylan Hacker,

It is a pleasure for us to finally announce a release of Open Dylan.

The last release with an announcement was beta4, in April 2007. Since then we have decided to use another versioning scheme: $year.$count; this release version is 2011.1. We will be doing more regular releases and are already hard at work on 2012.1 for next month!

One of the most important changes from the last four years is that the remaining rights holders of Functional Objects (the original developers of what became Open Dylan) agreed to re-license all of their code for the compiler and runtime libraries under the MIT license.

We have also moved to GitHub:

https://github.com/dylan-lang/

Another big effort was made to decrease the size of the code base in order to improve its maintainability. In this release, compared to (the unannounced) beta5, we removed about 1/3 of the code base, from 1,200,000 lines of code down to 850,000 (according to https://www.ohloh.net/p/open-dylan).

This is the first joint release on all major platforms:

Windows (32-bit only, this is the only platform with the IDE right now, native back-end)
Mac OS X (32-bit, Intel (10.6+) and PPC (10.5) using the C back-end)
Linux (32-bit (with the native back-end) and 64-bit (with the C back-end))
FreeBSD (32-bit only, native back-end)

The C back-end currently does not support multi-threaded programs.

We also developed a SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/) back-end, so you can develop in Emacs and get cross references, M-. and arguments.

The library functional-dylan has been phased out. It was mainly importing and exporting dylan and common-dylan. Use dylan or common-dylan as appropriate.

The release also includes several bug fixes and improves error reporting. However, many bugs and issues with error reporting remain. Please report problems that you have in our issue tracker:

https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/issues

You can get it from our website, http://opendylan.org/download/ . On Windows there is an installer, on UNIX systems unpack into /opt.

Now follows a more detailed list of changes:

Notable compiler changes¶

The command-line compiler is now called dylan-compiler instead of minimal-console-compiler (or opendylan).

The ‘remove build products’ command has been renamed to ‘clean’, which is more common and intuitive.

We fixed the error reporting in several ways: cleanup handlers are called correctly now (no “Attempting to build during another build!” anymore). Also, when an error is caused, the reporting does not error. Additionally warnings and errors from subprojects are now reported (rather than only put into the log file).

We support output of internal debug messages via a dylan-compiler argument (internal-debug, set to a list of debug-targets, like project-manager, linker,...). Additionally Harp, DFM and assembler output of the compiler can be written to the build directory (via harp, dfm, assembler command-line flags).

The dylan-compiler supports -version and -shortversion flags.

In Deuce, a buffer which is modified is now marked with an asterisk.

On application shutdown, a list of closures is called, which can be registered via register-application-exit-function. Also the GC is properly shut down.

The build system both on UNIX and Windows has lots of improvements and is even less code. There is no longer support to checkout code via CVS, though.

The runtime lives in dylan-support.o, which is linked into libdylan, rather than a _glue.o which was emitted for every application. The system library contains offsets into C structures (like stat) for all major platforms, including 64-bit versions.

The function closure-size no longer lives in dfmc-execution, but in dfmc-flow-graph. The library dfmc-execution was removed.

Library Improvements¶

We consolidated file and standard-io under the same buffered file-accessor. We also improved the run-application function, which now can spawn asynchronous processes, redirect standard-input, standard-output and standard-error, set the working directory and environment variables.

If write is interrupted (by EINTR), we call write again until it has written all bytes.

The function join now works on an empty sequence.

The function position takes start and end keyword parameters, and its performance was improved.

A new function, integer-length, is now in common-dylan.

The function directory-contents now returns the contents of the directory.

We now support a with-input-from-string macro in the streams module.

A new library, ssl-network, wraps openssl and integrates into the already existing network library.

The element-setter for the forward-iteration-protocol of <ordered-key-collection> has been fixed.

Shift operations on machine words are inlined now.

The <smtp-error> class contains a slot with the error-code.

Testworks has been vastly improved, and improved test suites are provided for the Dylan library, common-dylan and jam.

Mac OS X¶

The support on Mac OS X improved immensely; the code which retrieves the path to the running application now uses _NSGetExecutablePath. Also, setting environment variables is now supported on Mac OS X. The system library is renamed on Mac OS X to odsystem to prevent interfering with the built-in System library.

Back-ends¶

In the native back-end we pass integer and floating point exceptions to the Dylan runtime on Linux and FreeBSD platforms.

In the C back-end we emit volatile for all the variables inside of a bind-exit block which need to be volatile.

We defer the back-end selection to the end of the compilation of the compiler to reduce the compilation time for compiler hackers.

Removed code¶

The majority of the removed code was not used, on the one hand code for the LispWorks emulator, on the other hand (half-finished) support for outdated platforms: namely a native PPC backend, a half-finished Java backend; Mac OS (Classic), IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and OSF3 platform support.

It also included the separation in three disjoint releases, basic, enhanced and enterprise - which was useful back when the compiler was developed commercially, but is no longer.

The amount of applications for the command-line compiler has been decreased from eight to four, namely dylan-compiler, dylan-environment (including execution and debugging) and dylan-*-with-tools, which includes the tools interface (remote debugging, scepter, OLE).

Also, the old pentium-dw (DylanWorks) application was removed since it is no longer used and is unnecesary..

We unified the dfmc-shell/command-shell and environment-commands/commands libraries, which are the interactive shell. (Previously the otherwise obsolete dfmc-shell was used in the interactor).

New Documentation

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:00:00 -0000

New Documentation¶

For a long time, our documentation has been in poor condition. Much of it was originally in Framemaker in the 1990s and then automatically converted to HTML. This had left it in a form that was very difficult to maintain and we haven’t been able to provide our documentation in all of the formats that we’d like (HTML Help on Windows, ePub, PDF, etc).

After some research, we’re in the process of moving our documentation to Sphinx. Sphinx is used very widely in the Python world and uses ReStructured Text as the input format. This has proven pretty easy to work with and should greatly reduce the barrier to contributing.

As part of this, the documentation has moved back within the Open Dylan repository in the documentation directory where it can be built right along side the compiler and runtime.

We’re also writing some new extensions to Sphinx to handle Dylan specific constructs, make it easier to document Dylan code and link to the DRM. These extensions can be found in the sphinx-extensions repo on GitHub.

There will still be a fair bit of work to update and improve the documentation, but this should prove much easier now that we have it in a modern format that we all can work with!

Welcome to the new website!

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0000

Welcome to the new website!¶

As part of recharging Open Dylan development, we’ve re-done the website and cleaned up a lot of the old, out-dated material here.

If you’re looking for some of the old material, it can be found over at http://old.opendylan.org/.