Open Dylan 2023.1

This document describes the 2023.1 release of Open Dylan, released 01 June, 2023. The highlights of the release are listed below. For complete details see the commit logs for this release.

Note

Some commit logs, for example for testworks and other libraries that are included in Open Dylan as git submodules, may be in other repositories.

• Download the release: https://opendylan.org/download

• Read documentation: https://opendylan.org

• Report problems: https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/issues

Compiler

• The “batteries included” installation includes LLVM version 16.0.5 and BDW GC version 8.2.4.

• Dylan Enhancement Proposal (DEP) 12 was implemented, adding multi-line and “raw” string literals.

• Improvements to LLVM bitcode generation

• A bug in parser expansions that could crash the compiler if the end delimiter was missing has been fixed.

• Bug 1490, which could result in spurious warnings from the compiler has been fixed.

Tooling

• The dylan command-line tool has had various improvements, including:

  • Simplified workspace model

  • Simplified process to publish packages

  • Packages installed locally in workspace directory by default

  • Global package installation follows the XDG Base Directory Specification.

  • Symlink points to current installed version of packages, for easier tooling.

  Full documentation is here.

• The make-dylan-app program has been removed and is replaced by dylan new application and dylan new library.

Library Updates

Submodules

Open Dylan uses Git submodules to pull in some dependencies and user programs may depend on these for now. The notable changes in those submodules are listed below:

• sphinx-extensions - Improvements to DRM references.

• dylan-tool - See above.

• collection-extensions - The split-at function has been removed. Use split instead. Documentation improvements.

• command-line-parser - Minor bug fix to add a missing newline when no subcommand is provided.

• json - Fixed sort-keys? option for recursive print-json calls.

system Library

• A bug in locator-directory for relative directory locators was fixed.

• The run-application function is now fully documented.

• A follow-links?: keyword argument has been added to the file-exists? function. The default is true, for compatibility with the previous behavior.

Contributors

We’d like to thank all the people who made contributions to this release and to surrounding libraries in the Dylan ecosystem. This list is probably incomplete…

• Fernando Raya

• Peter S. Housel

• Bruce Mitchener

• Carl Gay