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To be honest, Dylan is not exactly alive anymore. CL and Smalltalk still have commercial vendors providing implementations, Dylan has currently two implementati

To be honest, Dylan is not exactly alive anymore. CL and Smalltalk still have commercial vendors providing implementations, Dylan has currently two implementations, but one of those (Gwydion) is completely neglected and the other (OpenDylan) has maybe 5 developers working on it in their spare time. It's a shame because even with its verbose syntax Dylan is a nice language, with a module system, with object system based on multimethods, with hygienic macros and, as you noted, an AOT compiler. It could be huge. We could have ended with Dylan in the place of Java and we'd be better off with that. I consider Dylan one of the biggest missed opportunities in PL space.

pjmlp 9y ago
True, but they all provide real life examples of what it possible in terms of compilation. On Dylan's case, the team even decided to implement their own OS as last milestone, although the decision had already fallen for using C++ instead. So this all Ruby and Python are slow because they are dynamic, isn't exactly how things went in other equally dynamic languages. Python JITs just need a bit more love.