Last updated on 8 April 2000
The following software for BeOS is available from this site:
Here you can obtain a port of the Gwydion Dylan software development tools for the BeOS operating system. For the impatient you can jump straight to the files and installation instructions.
Quoting from the description by Peter Hinely available at the Gwydion Dylan web site:
"Dylan is an advanced, object-oriented, dynamic language which supports the rapid development of programs. When needed, the programmer can later optimize [his or her] programs for more efficient execution by supplying type information to the compiler. Nearly all entities in Dylan (including functions, classes, and basic data types such as integers) are first class objects. Additionally Dylan supports multiple inheritance, polymorphism, multiple dispatch, keyword arguments, object introspection, and many other advanced features..."
More information about the Dylan language, including both free and commercial versions of Dylan compilers for the Windows operating system, is available at the Functional Objects web site. Other web sites with information and introductions to the Dylan language include:
I've ported the 'Dylan to C' (d2c) compiler of the Gwydion Dylan project to the Intel version of BeOS V5 Personal.
D2C is written in Dylan. I used my previous port of Gwydion Dylan to bootstrap the new version of the compiler. The distribution includes D2C, and a number of Dylan tools. This installation can be used to compile the source from the source archive, or the CVS repository. It does not include the Mindy bytecode interpreter. Although this was supplied with the previous distribution it did not work properly. I have removed it until I get it to compile and run correctly under BeOS V5.
Note: If you are having problems downloading the large file from this server, it can also be obtained from one of the Gwydion Dylan mirror sites in the contributions subdirectory.
I compiled this version using BeOS 5.0 but it may still run on BeOS 4.5.2. If not, you can use the previous distribution that I compiled under 4.5.2 to compile the sources for Gwydion Dylan 2.3.3.
To use Gwydion Dylan on BeOS effectively you need a few GNU tools installed.These tools are autoconf, automake and libtool. The versions I used were obtained from ftp.gnu.org and they were:
I install all my unix like tools in /boot/home/usr/local but they
can be installed anywhere. Just replace the paths in the descriptions below
with the path you want to use:
bin subdirectory of the above directory in your path:
export PATH=$PATH:/boot/home/usr/local/bin
tar -zxvf autoconf-2.13.tar.gz
cd autoconf-2.13
./configure --prefix=/boot/home/usr/local
make
make install
tar -zxvf automake-1.4.tar.gz
cd automake-1.4
make
make install
tar -zxvf libtool-1.3.4.tar.gz
cd libtool-1.3.4
ln -s acinclude.m4 libtool.m4
./configure --prefix=/boot/home/usr/local
make
make install
cd /boot/home/usr/local
tar -zxvf gwydion-dylan-2.3.3-x86-beos-gcc.tar.gz
export DYLANDIR=/boot/home/usr/local
cd
make-dylan-app test-dylan
cd test-dylan
d2c test-dylan.lid
./test-dylan
test-dylan should print "Hello, World!" when run.To compile Gwydion Dylan from the source you will need to install it first, as described above. This is because the compiler 'd2c' is written in Dylan and requires a Dylan compiler to build it. Follow these steps:
gd/src directory and run autogen.sh:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/boot/home/usr/local --enable-shared=no --disable-mindy
make
make install
More sample programs, demos and documentation are available in the Gwydion Dylan source code release.
There is a contributions section on the various Gwydion Dylan mirror sites containing lots of useful Dylan source that will work with d2c. Discussion on the Dylan language is available at the newsgroup comp.lang.dylan.
You can call functions written in 'C' from Dylan. For the C++ BeOS API functions you can compile 'C' wrappers and call the wrappers from Dylan. I have used this to create GUI applications with Dylan and I will put some examples of this here sometime soon.
The Dylan libraries and executables are currently quite large. Gwydion Dylan has shared library support but I have not got this working in the current BeOS port. Expect the executable sizes to drop dramatically when this is working.
Any questions, comments or suggestions for this port can be sent to Chris Double.