Gwydion Dylan 2.4
=================

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.

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.

Release 2.4 marks the end of feature development of a version of d2c that
bootstraps using mindy.  Versions 2.5 and onwards will support other
means of bootstrap, probably using cross-platform compilation of generated
C files.  We consider 2.4 to be of production stability, even though
it still lacks certain features.

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/
  Mail to the maintainers: gd-hackers@gwydiondylan.org
  Newsgroup:               news: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
gd-hackers-request@gwydiondylan.org with the word "subscribe" in the subject 
to subscribe. If you want to contribute code or documentation, we 
enthusiastically encourage you to do so.