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Comment by pjmlp

1 year ago

The platform which Dylan was originally designed for, the Newton had no C to begin with.

There were two teams fighting for delivering the OS, one using Dylan, other using C++, eventually the C++ team won the internal politics, even though the Dylan one was relatively ahead.

Newton was programmed in NewtonScript, prototype based OOP.

Eventually the SDK allowed for C++ native extensions, and on the later version of the OS, before Newton was killed, there was already a basic JIT in place.

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pjmlp

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lispm  1 year ago

> The platform which Dylan was originally designed for, the Newton had no C to begin with.

These platforms had no development tools. The firmware and software runtimes were created outside. I would guess that there definitely C was involved for much of the firmware and that an on device Dylan runtime had C and assembler code.

  • pjmlp  1 year ago

    Assembler for sure, as even today it is unavoidable in low level firmware coding, at the time Apple was a Object Pascal/C++ shop, usually the C like APIs were extern "C" in many of the toolbox APIs implementation.