Open Dylan 2011.1 released¶

Dear Dylan Hacker,

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

The last release with an announcement was beta4, in April 2007. Since then we have decided to use another versioning scheme: $year.$count; this release version is 2011.1. We will be doing more regular releases and are already hard at work on 2012.1 for next month!

One of the most important changes from the last four years is that the remaining rights holders of Functional Objects (the original developers of what became Open Dylan) agreed to re-license all of their code for the compiler and runtime libraries under the MIT license.

We have also moved to GitHub:

Another big effort was made to decrease the size of the code base in order to improve its maintainability. In this release, compared to (the unannounced) beta5, we removed about 1/3 of the code base, from 1,200,000 lines of code down to 850,000 (according to https://www.openhub.net/p/open-dylan).

This is the first joint release on all major platforms:

Windows (32-bit only, this is the only platform with the IDE right now, native back-end)

Mac OS X (32-bit, Intel (10.6+) and PPC (10.5) using the C back-end)

Linux (32-bit (with the native back-end) and 64-bit (with the C back-end))

FreeBSD (32-bit only, native back-end)

The C back-end currently does not support multi-threaded programs.

We also developed a SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/) back-end, so you can develop in Emacs and get cross references, M-. and arguments.

The library functional-dylan has been phased out. It was mainly importing and exporting dylan and common-dylan. Use dylan or common-dylan as appropriate.

The release also includes several bug fixes and improves error reporting. However, many bugs and issues with error reporting remain. Please report problems that you have in our issue tracker:

You can get it from our website, http://opendylan.org/download/ . On Windows there is an installer, on UNIX systems unpack into /opt.

Now follows a more detailed list of changes: