Installing Gwydion Dylan for Windows

Gwydion Dylan, an open source Dylan compiler, can run under the Windows operating system using the Cygwin system.

The following steps will get you a working Gwydion Dylan compiler.

1) Install Cygwin

If you do not already have Cygwin installed, download the setup program from the Cygwin web site. Run the setup and install the current version of the packages.

2) Install extra GNU tools

You'll need up to date versions of 3 GNU tools. These are automake, autoconf and libtool. Download the following files (or later versions if available):

From a Cygwin bash shell, change to a directory to install the files in. I used /src and execute commands similar to the following:

cd src
tar -zxvf libtool-1.3.5.tar.gz
tar -zxvf automake-1.4.tar.gz
tar -zxvf autoconf-2.13.tar.gz
cd /src/automake-1.4
./configure
make
make install
cd /src/autoconf-2.13.tar.gz
./configure
make
make install
cd /src/libtool-1.3.5.tar.gz
./configure
make
make install

This should make and install all of the three tools. Now you can retrieve the Gwydion Dylan source code from the CVS repository.

3) Retrieve the Source Code

To retrieve the source code from CVS you must first logon to the CVS server:

cd /src
mkdir gd
cd gd
export set CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@berlin.ccc.de:/home/cvsroot
cvs login

Enter the password as 'anoncvs'. Now you can checkout the GD module:

cvs -z6 co GD

4) Build the dbclink tool

For the Windows version of Gwydion Dylan you need to compile and install a special programs for Mindy to work correctly:

cd /src/gd/tools/win32-misc
gcc -o dbclink.exe dbclink.c
mv dbclink.exe /usr/local/bin

5) Build the system

Since you don't already have a working copy of Gwydion Dylan you need to do a 'bootstrap' from Mindy. Mindy is a Dylan bytecode interpreter. It compiles Dylan to a bytecode and interprets that bytecode.

When bootstrapping, Mindy is used to compile Gwydion Dylan and then that bytecode version is used to re-compile Gwydion Dylan to C. That c-compiled version becomes the final Gwydion Dylan compiler that is installed.

If it sounds like a long process, that's because it is. Mindy interpreted programs are quite slow. Don't despair though. Run it overnight and you'll have a super fast Gwydion Dylan compiler in the morning. Once you have this bootstrapped compiler you need never bootstrap again. Just use the existing Gwydion Dylan binary to rebuild the system if you want to modify the compiler.

To bootstrap, perform the following steps:

cd /src/gd/src
./configure --enable-mindy-bootstrap
make
make install

6) Rebuild with the new D2C

Using the newly bootstrapped D2C, try rebuilding D2C again to test that it works ok. This should work faily quickly as you are not using Mindy to do the build.

cd /src/gd/src
rm config.cache
./configure
make
make install

7) Test the system

Test the system with a simple 'hello world' application:

cd /src
make-dylan-app hello1
cd hello1
make
./hello1

You should see 'Hello, World!' appear on the console.

8) Done!

Well done, you've successfully build Gwydion Dylan for Windows!