hannes mehnert

Dear Dylan Hacker,

I am proud to announce the Open Dylan 1.0 beta 4 release. This is the
first public release for all supported platforms: Windows (x86), Linux
(x86), FreeBSD (x86), Mac OS X (ppc and x86). The IDE is still only
available on Windows so far, on all other OS only a batch-compiler is
working. But we are working on a GTK+ 2.x backend for DUIM.

The release was done by the Dylan Maintainers, a group of Dylan users
all over the world, communicating via the gd-hackers@gwydiondylan.org
mailing list as well as via IRC, irc.freenode.net, channel #dylan.
Please let us know about any problems you encounter.

Open Dylan was formerly known as Functional Developer, formerly known
as Harlequin Dylan.

The released binaries are available from
http://www.opendylan.org/downloads/opendylan/1.0beta4/


Here is a partial list of resolved issues:
* The c back end of DFMC works now, and is used on Mac OS X. This
eases porting the compiler to various architectures.

* 'macroexpand expression' is now working in system and user
projects. This can be invoked either via the IDE or via the
interactive compiler environment.

* SO_REUSEADDR is set on sockets opened, so an application can
open a socket which has old connections in use. No need to
wait until connections are gone from TIME_WAIT state. This
only affects the UNIX OS.

* "{complex type}" was shown when a non-class type was used
somewhere. This was not very helpful in the IDE as well as
in error messages of the compiler.

* expiration checks are removed. When developed commercially,
all libraries had an expiration date, which is no longer useful
because the source is public now.

* a primitive stack walker has been implemented for UNIX. This
helps to debug Dylan applications, because gdb does not work
for them.

* streams were not locked, so race conditions were possible. We
chose to be better safe than sorry, and all streams are now
locked by default.

* On linux, __errno_location was used to get the value of errno
when a system call failed. This is no longer supported by glibc
and led to crashes.

* In the IDE all possible restarts were labeled with "Undescribed
restart", which was not really useful. This was an initialization
problem.

* The IDE editor had the problem "#f is not of type {<class>: <basic-
line>}"
when adding a line to a definition shown in multiple buffers.

* The IDE didn't support breakpoints in dependent projects because
the list of libraries was not initialized correctly.

* IDE: Force links of projects by default

* IDE: Fix annoying scrolling bug in deuce.

* IDE: Windows can be larger than the size of the primary display.

* IDE: Adding and removing elements to list views was broken in a
corner case.

* IDE: LVS_EX_FULLROWSELECT is now used; this enables a user to
select any column of a table instead of only the first.

Happy Hacking,

Hannes