Re: Getting started with OpenDylan

Howdy!

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Greg Miller <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm a FreeBSD user, and I've never been totally satisfied with a
> language, so I've been looking for a language to try out for a small
> game project I'm working on. I installed the latest OpenDylan via the
> ports system and tried to build and run a "Hello, world" program.
>

Our FreeBSD coverage is a bit less than our OS X and Linux coverage, but
things should still work there.


> A few issues that came up along the way:
>
> (1) Why does a Hello, World program need multiple source files?
>

The short answer is that things are set up for larger programs than
hello-world samples. The longer answer would be that we haven't addressed a
couple of issues in the compiler that would simplify things.  (It could be
2 files currently though.)

The LID is effectively a Makefile or other build system configuration.


> (2) Why doesn't the page showing the Hello, World program example
> provide directions on how to compiler and run it? Especially given the
> unusually high level of complexity involved in doing so.
>

Which page were you using?


> (3) Do I really need to manually edit variables in my .emacs and my
> environment path every time I add a new project in order to get this
> "registry" thing added? Or am I missing something?
>

The compiler will look in the current working directory for a registry and
use that to supplement what is in the installation directory.  What I
normally do is to use git submodules to pull in dependencies and then set
up a local registry to handle things. This way, there isn't a need to
maintain an OPEN_DYLAN_USER_REGISTRIES environment variable.

I don't use emacs, so I don't know what you need to do there.

This might be a good time to mention that we're building a new IDE on top
of IntelliJ and eventually this might simplify things.


> (4) Once I finally got through all the steps to build and run
> hello-world, it hung and pegged a processor core. I've tried a lot of
> languages, but this is the first time I've failed to build and run a
> Hello, world example.
>

Could you attach with gdb and give us a stack trace?


> (5) For my project, I'm going to need bindings for a GUI and a
> rendering surface (OpenGL or equivalent) running in a window. Is this
> functionality currently available and working? I like the Dylan
> language enough that I might find the time to develop some needed
> bindings myself if it comes to that, but it's not something I'd look
> forward to when working with a language and tools that are new to me.
>

Francesco Ceccon and I have some bindings for various versions of OpenGL as
well as the GLFW framework:

    https://github.com/dylan-foundry/calvino

There are some example applications in there for GLFW that have been
translated from C.

It shouldn't be hard to get these running on FreeBSD and we'd welcome a
pull request that took care of that.


> On the whole, my first impression is that the language is great, but
> the tools seem more complex and unfriendly than with other language
> implementations out there.
>
> Can anyone help get me up and running?
>

Keep asking questions and I'll keep answering. You might also give us a
visit on IRC at irc.freenode.net:6667 in #dylan for interactive discussions.

 - Bruce

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