Paul R. Potts
I found out today that Functional Developer, the flagship Dylan compiler and IDE, has gone open-source. That’s exciting news. It even applies to all the extra libraries that Functional Objects used to sell.
Of course, it is a huge project, and it now leaves the Gwydion project in a unique bind: they now have two high-quality, advanced, and extremely large codebases to work with. The two are “compatible” only in that most of the straight Dylan code involved is at least largely portable, modulo compiler and library bugs. Some of it has already been used with the Gwydion d2c compiler. That’s something. So, where to start?
I took a shot at compiling the Ravensbrook memory management codebase. This required a few tweaks to suppress warnings, but seemed to work after that. That’s just the beginning, though. Functional Developer has a full-blown GUI for Windows, and an alpha-level command-line compiler for Linux. It hasn’t been ported to MacOS X yet. They don’t even have full build instructions for Linux yet. The MacOS X port would be a great project to work on, but it is also quite intimidating. Porting the IDE would involve a complete implementation of the DUIM libraries. That could be valuable for both compilers. And it appears that someone has done at least preliminary work on generating PowerPC instructions!
But Dylan is already fragmented within the d2c project, because of the separation between the byte-code interpreter, Mindy, and d2c. Mindy’s main use these days seems to be in boostrapping d2c. There’s another interpreter project, Marlais, which seems to be at least marginally active; it is a true interactive interpreter, but I’m not sure how well it works at the moment. And of course there’s the buggy and abandoned Apple Dylan, which won’t run in emulation under MacOS X, and is even more unstable than usual under MacOS 9. That one’s out of the game, but lives on in spirit.
For the moment, I should just try to finish my somewhat derailed Dylan sample code project, and consider what I could do with a PC running the full version of Functional Developer, together with all the optional libraries, on Windows. I don’t have the PC, but maybe a suitable machine will magically arrive on my doorstep. Stranger things have been happening recently. But would it allow me to do anything that would help me find a good job? Would it contribute anything useful to the Gwydion group? Or would it just distract me from my job search? I’ll meditate on that and see where it leads me.