Dylan Programming Language

What's New

12/12/2011: Open Dylan is where development of the Dylan implementations and documentation on the Dylan language is continuing. The product previously known as "Functional Developer" (and Harlequin Dylan before that) is now open source and maintained by the Open Dylan developers. It's great to see the Dylan language continuing!
28/09/2005: Congratulations to the Dylan team who entered the 2005 ICFP programming competition for coming second and also winning the judges prize! Coverage on Slashdot. In other news, the Gwydion Dylan group have announced the release of 'Open Dylan 1.0beta1'. Open Dylan is the open source release of the Functional Developer Dylan programming environment, including debugger, IDE and lots of examples.
15/01/2005: Functional Developer has now been open sourced. The source code lives in the Gwydion Dylan source code repository and they are currently doing semi-regular snapshots for Win32 and Linux. A full release announcement hasn't been made according to the GD website while they are busy preparing the code so that it is easier to build and modify. Meanwhile, Win32 snapshots and Linux snapshots are available.
09/02/2003: Functional Developer may be open sourced. From a post by Scott McKay in comp.lang.dylan: "I'll spill the beans. We're trying to open-source the whole lot of it, but are working to get it in shape such that someone besides a Fun-O hacker can build it."
06/04/2002: Long time no update. I'm still using Dylan, specifically Functional Developer. I have some new libraries and notes to upload when I get some time to tidy them up and organise them.
16/10/2001: I wrote a little article on how I write socket servers in Dylan using Functional Developer. If you plan on using sockets with Dylan it might be worth a read.
09/09/2001: Added a page with a breakdown of all the Dylanlibs libraries, allowing individual downloads. Added a tip on using the interactor while debugging an application. Added Marlais to the introduction page. Tidied up some links.
07/09/2001: The Dylan-Hackers team entered the ICFP Programming competition and came second. Excellent result! Bruce Hoult, the captain of the team, has a write up about the entry.
05/09/2001: Functional Objects have a Linux version of their Dylan compiler available for alpha test. See their Linux Alpha Test page for details. It includes the sockets/network library and C-FFI so there's hope that some of my Dylanlibs libraries will work on Linux!
27/08/2001: It's been quiet on the news front here lately. The reason is not because I've stopped using Dylan, but rather I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to do an update.

In the meantime, Dylanlibs is still being updated by me as I add new libraries, Douglas Auclair is actively maintaining and has recently released a new version of Marlais, Gwydion Dylan has experimental DUIM support and Functional Objects have made noises about a new release in the works.

In the Gwydion Dylan mailing list Functional Objects mentioned a Linux compiler...maybe we'll see versions of Functional Developer on other platforms in the near future.

I have a number of freeware applications written in Dylan if you want to see what a functioning Dylan application looks like. See some of the following:
Creatures 3 utilities
OddsViewer
OddsViewer Pro

I also use Dylan in commercial applications but unfortunately have no links to any of the programs 'on the web'. I do plan to continue with tips and tricks, library updates, etc in the near future.

03/07/2001

Douglas Auclair has created a project on SourceForge for Marlais, a Dylan interpreter. Marlais is written in 'C' and features an interactor and supports the infix and prefix Dylan syntax.

19/06/2001

I've created a mailing list for the Dylanlibs project. You can get information on subscribing at the dylanlibs-discuss information page. Dylanlibs now includes http client code, http server code and html generation libraries.

02/05/2001

I've released the Dylan source code to many of my Creatures 3 utilities. It includes a GUI application written in DUIM for editing Creatures 3 genomes which uses quite a bit of DUIM features. It's available from the DylanLibs project page.

29/04/2001

I've created a SourceForge project to manage the development of my various Dylan libraries. Visit it at the DylanLibs project page. It currently contains a wrapper for the Microsoft XML Parser Version 3.0 that might prove useful to those wanting to use XML/XSLT from Dylan with Functional Developer.

25/04/2001

A brief outline of how to install and use Gwydion Dylan under Windows.

27/10/2000

Second update for the day was to add an XML-RPC library for Functional Developer. Includes an example application that calls routines from a couple of XML-RPC servers. Currently only client side support is done.

27/10/2000

Added a version of the Meta library with changes to enable it to compile with Functional Developer. This is a very useful library for writing parsing functions.

21/10/2000

Added tidy-com library. A wrapper around the HTML Tidy COM component. Useful for when parsing HTML using an XML or HTTP parser but the original HTML has overlapping tags or is not well formed in some other manner. Includes a project demonstrating sample usage by downloading an HTML file from my website and printing the warnings it produces when tidy is run on it.

15/10/2000

Added collection-extensions library.
Added make-x-sockets to the projects page. This application patches the Functional Developer network library source so that the protocols can be extended for SSL sockets (and other protocols).
Updated double-proxy-sockets to use make-x-sockets so that it can work with SSL sockets.
Added double-ssl-sockets which adds SSL socket support to Functional Developer.
Added double-http-client, a library for retrieving web pages.

14/10/2000

Jason Trenouth has written an article, 'Beyond Java' describing his experiences in building CORBA IDL compilers in Java and Dylan.

08/10/2000

Added double-proxy-sockets, a library for Functional Developer that allows sockets to work through some firewalls. Requires the Functional Objects network/sockets library.

29/09/2000

Added double-base64, a small library for encoding and decoding base64. Tested with Functional Developer 2.0 but should work with Gwydion Dylan as well.

10/09/2000

Douglas Auclair has ported Gwydion Dylan to the Win32 platform. See the Gwydion Dylan web site for details.

11/08/2000

A quick update to add an example project that shows how to load an icon from a resource and display it in a DUIM frame.

11/08/2000

Added a page containing contributed Dylan libraries. The first contributed library is a soft real time scheduler from Ron Franke-Polz.

20/07/2000

For those visiting from the recent Slashdot discussion about the Apple Cube, there is a Dylan implementation available for Apple Macs. See the Gwydion Dylan site for details. Dylan implementations are available on many platforms now, including:

19/07/2000: A service pack for Functional Developer is available from Functional Objects bringing the version up to 2.0.1. The patch provides Windows 2000 compatibility among other things.
05/07/2000: Byte.com have another article about Dylan, this time reviewing Functional Developer 2.0.
09/06/2000: Byte.com have an article on the Dylan programming language written by Martin Heller. Martin gives an overview of the language and what he thinks of it. Apparently the next column will have a review of Functional Developer.
27/05/2000: Added some more tips. The tips explain how to call Dylan functions from C and the difference between make() and initialize().

Functional Objects have placed the Functional Developer documentation online so I've started linking some of the tips to the relevant documentation.
14/05/2000: Added a project which demonstrates use of the WildTangent 3D games library in DUIM panes. Two examples are provided which are basically ports of examples given with the WildTangent SDK. Screenshots and source code are on the Wild Tangent project page.
16/04/2000: Added a tip talking about the difference between the two linkers that you can use with Functional Developer.
15/04/2000: Added the Simple Web Browser project as an example of a way of using ActiveX controls in DUIM panes. The example displays HTML using the Microsoft Web Browser ActiveX control.
11/04/2000: Added a couple of tips. The new tips explain how to view the expansion of a macro and a bit about the dynamic recompilation of methods while running a program in the Functional Developer debugger.
07/04/2000: Updated the site to remove references to the beta of Functional Developer 2.0 now that it has been released and confirmed that the information is still relevant for the release version. I've also updated the projects to compile with fun-dev 2.0.
03/04/2000: Functional Developer 2.0 is out of beta and available for purchase at the Functional Objects web site. There is still a free download version and they've split many of the libraries up for separate purchase - so you can pick and choose what functionality you want to buy.
19/03/2000: Added a tip on how to use the Microsoft XML library with Functional Developer. Added the Dylan page from the Open Directory Project to the links page.
17/03/2000: Added Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages and Matthias Hölzl's Homepage to the links page. Added a tip on how to enable extended selection on a <table-control>.

12/03/2000: Added some tips to the tips and techniques page.
29/02/2000: Added Douglas Auclair's website, The Dylan Programmer FAQ and a Dylan primer for Scheme programmers to the links page.
28/02/2000: A revamp of my Dylan site. The previous 'single page' design was getting a bit unwieldy so this is my attempt at organising it a bit.

It's not long now until the Dylan course that Douglas Auclair is running at the Annandale campus of the Northern Virginia Community College, U.S.A. It will be conducted from April 12 to May 10 2000. More details can be found at the Northern Virginia Community College continuing education page. If you're nearby and want to learn Dylan and/or OO programming this course would be a great opportunity.

25/01/2000: Jason Trenouth has written an article on using CORBA with interactive languages. Specific examples using the Dylan language and the Functional Developer IDE are given. It's available at the Functional Objects web site.

Less recent news available here.