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dylan-lang
opendylan
Dylan2013–2024
dylan-lang / opendylan

opendylan

Open Dylan compiler and IDE

Developer ToolsLanguages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
6Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
503GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Open Dylan compiler and IDE

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-11 08:05:04 UTC to 2024-04-24 19:02:32 UTC.

0122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
lispm·Jan 2, 2016
Nostalgia. Software archeology. Language hobbyists wishing to keep it in a working state. Besides that there is little reason to use Dylan, nowadays. (But see BruceM's comment about using this Dylan as a foundation for further development.) It was once developed by Apple to replace Object Pascal and C++ for application and also systems development. But with NeXT bought by Apple that was the role of Objective C and many years later now also for Swift. This particular version of Dylan was developed by Harlequin - the product name was DylanWorks. Harlequin was bought by Globalgraphics. Globalgraphics used the Postscript raster image processor developed by Harlequin and spun off the LispWorks system into its own company. Years later DylanWorks and even later MLWorks were open sourced. One idea of Harlequin was to develop a range of modern pro
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gramming languages, implementations for those and development environments: Postscript, Common Lisp, Dylan, ML, ... The implementations were closed source and proprietary. When Apple announced their Dylan, Harlequin hoped to follow a market leader by providing an implementation for platforms Apple would not cover: Unix, Windows, ... Also Harlequin might have hoped to use their Dylan themselves for development of software applications. But Harlequin in this forms does not exist anymore, DylanWorks has been open sourced and Apple has long ago lost interest in Dylan. On the positive side: this Dylan is free and open source and interested persons can study and, maybe, use it. Lisp users might be interested to study the prototyped implementation of Dylan for LispWorks. This implementation was not their shipped product, though. https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/tree/5f9225d246d771c... That particular version is another example of a non-trivial programming language built in Lisp - especially given that it also has a non Lisp-like syntax.
In Open Dylan
BruceM·Nov 30, 2015
In Open Dylan (http://opendylan.org/), we have a library of our own written in Dylan that lets us write out LLVM IR in binary files. We have to update it as LLVM changes, but that typically isn't all that bad. We have some macros and a bunch of functions then that make emitting LLVM IR simpler. For example, the "ins--iterate" and "ins--if" / "ins--else" macros in this code handle phi nodes and so on: https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/blob/05271f6fec9da05... This library is currently in the process of being updated from LLVM 3.5 to current HEAD as debug info has changed significantly upstream. After that, we will be landing some documentation for it as well. If you're interested in learning or hearing more about this, we're typically around on #dylan on freenode IRC.
In Musings on AOT, JIT and Language Design
rayiner·Oct 28, 2013
Macros unfortunately make themselves most useful in cases that don't lend themselves to short snippets. My favorite example involves looking at some real code. Compare how to add a new intrinsic to LLVM: http://llvm.org/docs/ExtendingLLVM.html versus how to do it for SBCL: http://pvk.ca/Blog/Lisp/hacking_SSE_intrinsics-part_1.html. Look at how SBCL's x86-64 backend defines the x86-64 register set and specifies what kind of values can go in what registers: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/compiler/x86-64.... Compare that to the equivalent for LLVM: http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/llvm/trunk/lib/Target/X8.... The register descriptions are written in a very similar, declarative, way, except the SBCL code uses macros built into the language while the LLVM code uses a separate tool called TableGen that generates C++ code from t
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he declarative descriptions. Using a separate tool means complicating the build process, having an ad-hoc parser/expander that can be a source of bugs, losing access to compiler facilities that allow you to step through the expansions and look at the expanded code, etc. If you can't get through the prefix syntax, look at how the OpenDylan compiler uses a macro to define the x86 instruction set: https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/blob/master/sources/... Also see the x86-64 assembler I wrote in Common Lisp: https://github.com/rayiner/amd64-asm/blob/master/encoders.li.... Specifically, lines 374-504, 621+. Each instruction description basically specifies a list of alternative patterns that are matched against the assembly source. When a pattern matches, it is handed off to a compiled function that generates the actual encoded bytes. That function is automatically generated at compile-time from the declarative list of patterns. Not exactly brilliant code like you'll find in SBCL, but in a couple of weekends I was getting bit-for-bit identical assembly to YASM over a substantial subset of the instruction set. Part of the testsuite uses the same instruction descriptions that are used to generate the encoder: https://github.com/rayiner/amd64-asm/blob/master/testsuite.l... (Line 128).
In Lisp for C++ programmers

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