[rayiner]

Aside from Apple having abandoned the language, the basic issue is that Dylan projects were very ambitiois. Dylan was aimed at C++, so Harlequin and CMU spent a huge amount of time developing sophisticated native code compilers, thread-safe GC, compilation to native executables, etc. Harlequin also did a whole IDE, with GUI toolkit and Emacs-like editor, all written in Dylan and self-hosted. Ruby, Python, etc, showed there was a market for simple dumb implementations that were nonetheless useful, and got to market quickly because it was easy to do a little C interpreter that did a dictionary lookup every other operation.

There's a renaissance in native-compiled languages now, mainly thanks to LLVM and the JVM. Having a fast optimizing compiler back end that generates binaries on many platforms is a huge head start, and goes a long way to making the language immediately useful. The JVM gives you those and then some.

[pjmlp]

> There's a renaissance in native-compiled languages now, mainly thanks to LLVM and the JVM

No, technology just goes in circles.

Like 30 years ago when people started to realize P-Code and other VM approaches were too slow and resource hungry to be useful targeting minicomputers.

Now mobiles and high electricity costs are making developers reach the same conclusions again.

[phkahler]

> Now mobiles and high electricity costs are making developers reach the same conclusions again.

But rather than fall back on existing compiled languages, they are now trying to build something that has it all.

[pjmlp]

That is also not new. While the minicomputers struggled with VMs and got back to AOT compilation, research labs workstations already had mixed mode.

The first JIT were targeted at Lisp and Smalltalk environments, and commercial Lisps always had JIT + AOT compilation support.

As for going for something new, it is hard to bring people back to technologies that are no longer mainstream, without adding something new to it.