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40 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
This is a port of the CMU Gwydion project's implementation of the
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Dylan programming language. Dylan is an object-oriented language with
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many powerful features, including automatic memory management (garbage
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collection), generic functions (also known as multiple dispatch or
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multi-methods), multiple inheritance, a powerful and safe macro
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facility for extending the language's syntax, and a powerful class and
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function library. Though it is a DYnamic LANguage, it includes
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facilities for making compiled programs more efficient than many other
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dynamic languages.
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The Dylan language was originally developed by Apple, but the project
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was dropped just as the language definition was being finished and
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before a production-quality compiler was complete. The CMU Gwydion
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project and Harlequin have continued use and development of the
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language. For more information about the Dylan language, see the
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Dylan World site (http://www-dylan.uchicago.edu/).
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Gwydion Dylan actually contains two implementations of the language.
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One, called Mindy (Mindy Is Not Dylan Yet), is a bytecode compiler and
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interpreter that implements most of the language except for the macro
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facility. The other, d2c, is a compiler for the full language that
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uses C as its target "assembly language". The d2c compiler was
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written in Dylan and bootstrapped using Mindy.
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A copy of the d2c compiler binary is included with the port to
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bootstrap the entire system. As the Gwydion documentation says,
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Recompiling the entire system takes over an hour on 64meg 200mhz
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Pentium Pro running Windows/NT. This is almost all for the
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compilation of the d2c runtime and compiler; compiling just Mindy
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takes only a few minutes. d2c also uses lots of memory, especially
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when compiling itself: you want at least 48 meg, and more is
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better.
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For more information about building Gwydion dylan, see
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http://legend.gwydion.cs.cmu.edu/gwydion/dylan/docs/htdocs/unix-build.html.
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The Gwydion project home page is at http://legend.gwydion.cs.cmu.edu/gwydion/
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-Peter S. Housel- housel@acm.org
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