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Re: Mac OS X presents an opportunity for Dylan
On Wednesday, November 29, 2000, at 11:00 PM, David S. Harrison wrote:
> I recently installed the Mac OS X prerelease on my Macintosh at home
> and it occurred to me that OS X provides an interesting opportunity
> to attract developers to Dylan
Yes indeedy.
> Anyone know if Fun-O is targeting Mac OS X?
Not to my knowledge. Their strategic plan (on their web site) is for straight UNIX next.
> Does the CodeWarrior plug-in for d2c/mindy work on OS X?
Gabor's latest release of the d2c CodeWarrior plugin for CW 6 is Carbonized, so should work on MacOS X. I don't have 6 yet, so I can't comment on the final version. :-( The class browsing stuff is really cool, and it's an excellent way to work with Dylan code.
The next release of Gwydion Dylan will run out of the box on MacOS X from the command line with the developer tools installed (and possibly some GNU tool upgrades).
> Would it be feasible to quickly create bindings to Carbon (the new UI API for OS X)?
Pidgin isn't finished and we didn't have much luck with Melange for the Classic Toolbox headers, but there are hand coded Carbon wrappers for a usefully large subset of Carbon, covering graphics, events, UI stuff, files and a few other areas. If anyone wants more stuff, just say (or do).
The current tarball / CVS sources of Gwydion Dylan compile on MacOS X and contain the Carbon wrappers and a couple of demo applications, including Gareth Baker's Dylan versions of SillyBalls and a basic Carbon application, and my OO Application framework inspired by MOOF.
We (GD) also have OpenGL bindings (they compile on X with a little tweaking for include paths), but no QuickTime or Core Foundation yet. As those are more modern, I'd hope they'd be cleaner to parse.
> Given a reasonable development environment, I think it might
> be possible to attract a fair number of developers to Dylan.
Well, Functional Developer is much better than reasonable. I just wish they'd make their web site more boring-corporate. Between the CW plugin and the comman-line version of GD on MacOS X, we've got most people's preferences covered there. Work's been done looking into using GD with Project Builder, too.
> It seems like
> such a wonderful opportunity to wrest some developers from the
> dark ages of C/C++ and into the light.
We can hope. They tend to get frightened by the light. :-) Dylan is cleaner and quicker to program than C++ in my experience, and its OO model is less broken.
- Rob.
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