[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Re: What happened to Apple Dylan
Some minor corrections.
Spindler stopped Dylan because the engineers working on it were more
expensive than Apple could afford back than. Till the end of '95 the core
team got a chance to wrap up all they had and package it as a product which
came out as the Apple Dylan Technology Release. It featured PPC code
generation but did not itself run on PowerPC natively. The development bed
was all Common Lisp and there was no PPC MCL (Macintosh Common Lisp) at that
time. Later Digitool was paid to port the environment to PPC using their
development version of MCL for PPC they were working on. Apple Dylan TR PPC
was quietly released 1996. It still runs fine on classic MacOS, dunno about
X.
The team sometimes hinted that not bootstrapping the environment in Dylan
was a mistake. This would have eased the PPC adoption considerably. But in
the light of limited resources and a very strong CL background of the
members it was understandable.
Java did not materialize as the mainstream language Sun has hoped, and the
world still needs a good alternative to C++ (which is a major pain).
This is a second chance for Dylan and several people work on it.
Gabor
----------
>From: Raffael Cavallaro <raffael@mediaone.net>
>To: <info-dylan@ai.mit.edu>
>Subject: Re: What happened to Apple Dylan
>Date: Mit, 20. Jun 2001 3:19 Uhr
>
> 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
>
Follow-Ups: