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Comment by dannymi | Hacker News Reader

As a Guix developer (there's a lot of Scheme and Common Lisp in Guix :) ), every few years I check on Open Dylan but so far each time there was something missing that made me unable to package it for Guix (building it entirely from source).

I've checked it a few minutes ago and Open Dylan's ./configure says to download a bootstrap compiler from https://opendylan.org/download/index.html first -- but there's no such bootstrap compiler there.

Do you have some hints on how to package it?

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The way you actually have to do it is trawling through git repos to find an old version of Gwydion, bashing at it for a while, and maybe getting it to compile on modern platforms. Look for 2.4, then rewind, then pass a config flag, and a few more steps.

I wouldn't call Dylan thriving, unless you're a Windows user that really doesn't care about bootstrapping your language.

It's alive though, in the same sense that Miles, the dog that Segall froze and then brought back to life in 1987, was alive. Brain damaged, but alive.

Gwydion Dylan has been out of the picture for years. Open Dylan is the only maintained implementation. Perhaps you went down a wrong path....

You can't bootstrap OpenDylan from source without a Dylan compiler. You can bootstrap Gwydion without one with substantial elbow work, which you can then pivot into bootstrapping OpenDylan.

I know what I was doing, and if you look elsewhere in the thread, I was right about what the GUIX maintainer wanted. Not to get egg on your face.

There's no special "bootstrap compiler"; you can download a binary release for your platform from the page you linked, and then use that to bootstrap a newer version from a source checkout. If it would help, we could provide a minimalistic build that was only useful for bootstrapping, but at present our builds are "batteries included" (with LLVM/Clang and the BDW garbage collector already provided in the tarball).

Ideally, what Guix would want is similar to what https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/ does for Rust (a compiler, not written in Rust, for Rust).

So for Dylan, we'd like to have a compiler for Open Dylan, not written in Dylan. (it can also require multiple steps to get up to Open Dylan--that would be fine)

It's not in the interest of our users to use binary blob compilers for bootstrapping.

We would also unbundle LLVM, clang and the bdw gc and use the ones from Guix.

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