Apple Dylan - Development Environment

Development Environment

Apple Dylan includes a dynamic, integrated development environment inspired by Smalltalk, Macintosh Common Lisp and Think C. Like Think C—and unlike Smalltalk and Lisp—it draws a clear distinction between the development environment and the program being developed. It accomplishes this by linking code—called a “stub”—into the target program, allowing the IDE to communicate with it (to inject code, perform introspection, etc.) without sharing a runtime environment with the IDE.

The IDE (originally code-named “Hula”) includes:

  • "Binder": a tool for configuring browsers
  • A source database
  • A definition database
  • Incremental compilation
  • A cross-platform source debugger
  • Profiling tools
  • An interface builder

The basic browser window in the Apple Dylan environment is Binder. A Binder window consists of a number of linked panes. Each pane has an input, an output, an aspect and a presentation style. A pane's input is the output of another pane—a pane displays information about the selected object(s) in its input pane. Aspects are properties of the input, such as source code, contents, callers, readers, writers, references or compilation warnings. This information can be presented in an outline or a graph. Inputs, aspects and styles could be used to construct replicas of the Smalltalk source browser, or static call graphs, or ad-hoc displays such as the callers of readers of variables that the selected function writes. All views are live: recompiling a function updates any displays that include its who-calls information, for example.

The outline view includes visual indicators that display whether a source record has unsaved changes, has changed since it was last compiled or has compiler-generated messages (warnings and errors).

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