Gwydion Dylan 2.3
=================

THIS IS A TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW. It still has a number of known bugs, but
should be suitable for learning Dylan and developing command line
applications. Development releases are also available through the
maintainers' website; these offer more features and have a different set of
bugs.

Gwydion Dylan provides two implementations of the Dylan programming
language: Mindy and d2c. Mindy is bytecode compiler and interpreter, and
d2c is a Dylan-to-C compiler. Mindy compiles programs quickly, but the
resulting executables run slowly. On the other hand, d2c compiles programs
slowly, but they run quickly. Future development will mostly concentrate on
removing bugs from d2c, adding new features, and making it run faster.
Although we will still port Mindy to new architectures, we probably won't
be improving it significantly.

A frontend to gdb, named dig, is now available for most platforms. It
helps debugging programs compiled with d2c.

Gwydion Dylan was originally written by the Gwydion Group at CMU as part of
a research project studying advanced hypercode development environments. It
is now maintained by a group of volunteers.

To install Gwydion Dylan, take a look at the INSTALL file. For a brief
overview, see the man pages dylan(7), gwydion(7), d2c(1), mindy(1),
melange(1) and make-dylan-app(1).

If you'd like a tutorial or a more thorough reference, see the maintainers'
web site (below). The following online resources are available:

  Maintainers' website:    http://www.gwydiondylan.org/
  Gwydion group:           http://legend.gwydion.cs.cmu.edu/
  FTP Site:                ftp://ftp.gwydiondylan.org/pub/gd/
  FTP Site (mirror):       ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/unix/languages/dylan/
  Bug reports:             gd-bugs@gwydiondylan.org
  Mail to the maintainers: gd-hackers@gwydiondylan.org
  Newsgroup:               comp.lang.dylan

If you use Gwydion to any extent, you'll want subscribe to gd-hackers so
you can ask questions and report the inevitable bugs. Send a message to
majordomo@gwydiondylan.org with the body "subscribe gd-hackers". If you want
to contribute code or documentation, we enthusiastically encourage you to
do so.

Be warned: Gwydion is not primarily intended for production work. Some of
the omissions and shortcomings are fairly noticable, but it *has* been used
in real-world projects before. Use Gwydion only if you're feeling daring
and wish to experiment with a compiler currently under development.