[housel]

(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.

[dannymi]

As a Guix developer (there's a lot of Scheme and Common Lisp in Guix :) ), every few years I check on Open Dylan but so far each time there was something missing that made me unable to package it for Guix (building it entirely from source).

I've checked it a few minutes ago and Open Dylan's ./configure says to download a bootstrap compiler from https://opendylan.org/download/index.html first -- but there's no such bootstrap compiler there.

Do you have some hints on how to package it?

[headhasthoughts]

The way you actually have to do it is trawling through git repos to find an old version of Gwydion, bashing at it for a while, and maybe getting it to compile on modern platforms. Look for 2.4, then rewind, then pass a config flag, and a few more steps.

I wouldn't call Dylan thriving, unless you're a Windows user that really doesn't care about bootstrapping your language.

It's alive though, in the same sense that Miles, the dog that Segall froze and then brought back to life in 1987, was alive. Brain damaged, but alive.

[housel]

There's no special "bootstrap compiler"; you can download a binary release for your platform from the page you linked, and then use that to bootstrap a newer version from a source checkout. If it would help, we could provide a minimalistic build that was only useful for bootstrapping, but at present our builds are "batteries included" (with LLVM/Clang and the BDW garbage collector already provided in the tarball).

[wott]

I haven't given a look at this language in a few years; is it still so that there are no enums, and that operators must be surrounded by spaces?

[cgay]

Yes. Making a macro for defining enums isn't that hard (there's one here: https://github.com/cgay/uncommon-dylan/blob/master/enum.dyla...).

I, for one, welcome my whitespace-surrounded operator overlords, but if you really don't want that you're welcome to use function-call syntax for them.