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Re: What happened to Apple Dylan



On 6/19/01 5:00 PM, Levi Conley, (shepherdofchaos@cs.com), wrote:

> ...which brings me to another
> question, what the hell happened with Apple/Dylan anyway?  Why did
> Apple pull the plug?


The Apple Dylan project died in early '95 (if memory serves - I was a seed
site for Apple Dylan). The Dylan team were under a lot of pressure to get a
working release out the door when two things sort of took them by surprise:

1. Apple started to become less profitable because of the Wintel juggernaut.
With Apple no longer so profitable, the Apple suits started to look for
research projects to axe. Those that didn't seem likely to ship a profitable
product in the near future were at the top of the list. Apple Dylan at the
time was still not ready for release - it compiled pretty slowly (i.e.,
compile times were long), especially compared to CodeWarrior C/C++, since it
hadn't yet been optimized. Apple managers were talking about rewriting it in
C++ to make it run faster (not realizing that Common Lisp can be optimized
to run as quickly as C/C++).

2. Apple was making the transition to PowerPC, and Apple Dylan still only
ran on 68k machines, and only compiled to 68k binaries.


So, it was looking like it would be at least another year, maybe two before
there was a usable PowerPC product, so the project was cancelled.

As it turned out, that was probably a good move by Apple, since by the time
a PowerPC Dylan shipped, Java would already have taken the development world
by storm.

-- 

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffael@mediaone.net



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