Open Dylan's Call for Help

It's a crying shame that Dylan did not become the systems language of Apple's new era — it's really quite lovely. Much nicer than Objective C, though undoubtedly trickier to compile efficiently.

A lot of open source projects are quite human resource constrained. I see two solutions to this problem:<p>- universal citizen revenue, so that programmers who want to work on free software or open source may do it more easily.<p>- let&#x27;s reduce the ecosystem diversity. I&#x27;d move to drop all those useless fancy languages, and let&#x27;s all concentrate on Common Lisp, developping tools and libraries, perfecting the implementations, etc.<p>(No need to argue, I know the former will occur sooner).

In the mid-90s I did some playing round with something called MINDY from Carnegie Mellon. It was (IIRC) a Dylan interpreter (the acronym was &#x27;MINDY Is Not Dylan Yet&#x27;) and was very interesting both to experiment with Dylan and also to see how MINDY itself was implemented. As I remember, a cool thing about the Dylan concept was that it had a sliding scale of dynamic-ness - in other words you could start off being quite relaxed about types but, where needed, you could narrow down the types, seal generic methods etc. and the compiler would then be able to optimise better, for example by avoiding dynamic dispatch if it could prove it knew the specific method at compile time.

ah, Dylan! I remember from far 2005 a team called &quot;Dylan Hackers&quot; who earned both the judges&#x27; prize and the second prize at the ICFP Contest (cop &amp; robbers), <a href="http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;icfpc.plt-scheme.org&#x2F;</a>.<p>Here the blog post describing their entry: <a href="http://www.hoult.org/bruce/icfp2005/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hoult.org&#x2F;bruce&#x2F;icfp2005&#x2F;</a>

When reading about Dylan, it seems one of it&#x27;s main selling points is &quot;everything is an object.&quot; But nowadays, that&#x27;s true in many other dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and Clojure. Macros are everywhere and you can even add them to Python if you want to using third party modules. Though I&#x27;ve never felt the need because Python&#x27;s syntax is excellent as it is.<p>For me it is very hard to see what Dylan brings to the table. It&#x27;s nieche is already filled by more popular languages.

For those interested in using Dylan or helping out, I&#x27;ve found the community very welcoming to beginners and they&#x27;re eager to help you get started.

Since Dylan people are probably reading this.<p>- What GC will the LLVM backend use?<p>- Is there any data an the performance of the MPS?

Developing the language is more interesting then developing tooling I guess. F# has same issues.