Re: Getting started with OpenDylan

On 10/13/13, Bruce Mitchener <[email protected]> wrote:
> Howdy!
>
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Greg Miller <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>> 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.)

I suspect this is one of those things that doesn't help when new users
are deciding whether to try the language. I think low barrier to entry
is pretty critical.

>> (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?

http://opendylan.org/about/examples/hello_world.html

>> (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.

That's good. It seemed like a potential headache. I'm still unclear on
what the registries are for and how to use them correctly, though.
I'll have to play around with it.

That being said, this does all raise the barrier to entry a bit more.
There are tons of other development environments out there for various
languages that manage to support large projects while still supporting
the "compiler -o hello-world hello-world.ext ; ./hello-world"
paradigm.

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

Well, the page on dylan-mode, DIME, etc. seems to imply that it's
mandatory to set a registry path in your .emacs when you add
dylan-mode to your configuration. An adjustment to the wording might
be helpful.

> 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.

Maybe, although I'm fairly attached to emacs.

>> (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?

I'll see what I can do.

> 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.

I'll see what I can do.

> Keep asking questions and I'll keep answering.

Thanks.
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