Historical Notes

Melange was originally created as part of the Gwydion project at Carnegie Mellon University. As such, it was built to target the mindy interpreter and the d2c compiler.

It has since been converted to target the OpenDylan environment, using OpenDylan’s C-FFI support.

Differences from Creole

It would be difficult to produce an exhaustive list of the differences between Creole and Melange. We can, however, include a brief examination of the most important incompatibilities between the two systems.

• Creole’s type: options have been replaced by Melange’s equate: and map: options.

• Creole’s “access path” options have been replaced by object-file: and mindy-include-file:.

• The interface to import-value and export-value differ between the two systems.

• Melange does not inherit type mappings from other define interface forms.

• Creole does not import definitions from “recursively included” header files, even if they are referenced by definitions which are imported.

• Creole does not support C vectors or “sub-structures” as first class objects.

• Melange does not presently support callbacks, export-temporary-value, <pascal-string>, with-stack-structure, with-stack-block, or alien-method.

• Creole will never consider instances of two distinct statically typed pointer classes to be =, even if they refer to the same address.