Gwydion Dylan is freely available implementation of a dynamic language strongly resembling the language defined in the Dylan Reference Manual. Gwydion Dylan differs in a number of ways from the official language definition, see d2c limitations, Mindy v.s. Dylan and extensions. See the copyright notice for the conditions under which Gwydion Dylan is made available.
DylanTM is a trademark of Apple Computer Corp.
Gwydion Dylan provides two different execution engines:
These ports of Gwydion Dylan or bare Mindy are also available at other sites:
Gwydion is a small research project, and most of our effort in the near future will be devoted to developing a "hypercode" programming environment. The amount of time and effort we can put into supporting this release is extremely limited. We will try to answer mail to gwydion-bugs@cs.cmu.edu , but we can't guarantee that our replies will be timely or that we will fix every bug reported. We are releasing the Gwydion Dylan source so that users can fix things for themselves if they choose to do so. We encourage users to send improvements and bug-fixes to us so that we can add them to future releases.
In contrast, d2c is a bootstrapped system, written almost entirely in Dylan, and has been explicitly configured to run on a set of known platforms. Though it is possible to rebootstrap via Mindy, and the configure script will attempt to do so if a d2c binary is not found, in practice you don't want to do this, as it takes nearly forever. So if you want to run d2c, you need a binary distribution. Once you have the binary distribution, you can recompile d2c from sources if you want. An additional d2c portability limitation comes from the use of the Boehm conservative GC; sources are included, but it does have platform-specific configuration.
Gwydion Dylan seems to work on Windows '95, but has not been extensively used on that platform.
The binary distributions contain top-level bin, lib, etc and include directories. Ideally the distribution should be unpacked in /usr/local on Unix or c:\dylan on Windows. If the binaries are installed somewhere else, users must set the DYLANDIR environment variable to point to the root directory of the installation before they run d2c or Mindy.
You will also want to set your PATH environment variable to include the "bin/" directory so that you can actually run the installed programs. On Windows you may need to set other environment variables related to the C compiler.
.tar.gz files can be unpackaged by typing:
gzip -d filename.tar.gz tar -xvf filename.tar
.zip files (Windows only) can be unpackaged with any "unzip" utility that supports long file names. PKunzip is not one of these. A free unzip utility, the Info-ZIP extractor, is available in the release area.
Note about for unpacking the source distribution on Windows: There is a tar and gzip in the gnu-win32 distribution (see Windows Requirements), but tar seems rather flaky. You might want to try some commercial app such as WinZip. For help on using Gwydion Dylan, see the documentation index.
Recompiling the entire system takes over an hour on 64meg 200mhz Pentium Pro running Windows/NT. This is almost all for the compilation of the d2c runtime and compiler; compiling just Mindy takes only a few minutes. d2c also uses lots of memory, especially when compiling itself: you want at least 48 meg, and more is better.
Build instructions have been divided into two pages: