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, https://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!