Open Dylan 2014.1 released

Dear Dylan Hacker,

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

Dylan is a multi-paradigm functional and object-oriented programming language. It is dynamic while providing a programming model designed to support efficient machine code generation, including fine-grained control over dynamic and static behaviors.

For more information on Open Dylan, see our website and our documentation.

We have extensive release notes, but highlights include:

  • bash completion scripts are available.

  • The foundation of an Objective C / Dylan bridge has been integrated with the compiler. This enables using the objc-dylan library.

  • Passing structs by value using C-FFI now works on both the C and HARP back-ends.

  • Performance improvements have been made to various libraries.

  • Laying the groundwork for LLVM compiler back-end support to arrive in 2015.

  • Laying the groundwork for improving our Unicode support.

  • Many other miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

Please report problems that you have in our issue tracker.

You can get it from our website, https://opendylan.org/. 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)

Our plan is to have a first release of Open Dylan with an LLVM-backed compiler back-end within the next couple of months as our 2015.1 release. Here’s hoping we can make that happen!

Good luck and happy Dylan hacking!