Deft, a Dylan Environment For Tools

Deft is a framework for producing tools for building and working with Dylan projects. Projects can customize the behavior by providing a deft-package.json file.

It is extensible and will support plug-in loading in the future.

It is currently under development.

Building Deft

You must build Deft with a build of Open Dylan from the master branch. Deft relies on features which have been added to Open Dylan in the 2014.1 release.

To get things set up correctly, please use the Makefile to build Deft:

make

Installing Deft

To install Deft, you can use the Makefile:

make install

This will copy a variety of things to /opt/deft and you can then add /opt/deft/bin to your path.

If you want to change the install destination, you can override the INSTALL_DIR:

make install INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/deft

Getting Started

A few notes on getting started with Deft, until we have full documentation...

cd into the directory containing the project you want to work on and start Deft from there. It will look for config files and/or a "registry" directory. In the simple case, where you only need that single registry directory there is no need for a config file. See the Config Files section, below.

Command Line Interface

Press Tab for command auto-completion. If you press Tab with no other input Deft will show you a list of possible commands. Type "help<Tab>" to see what you can get help on.

Press Control-d to exit.

Control-z (to suspend the process) is not yet implemented.

Config Files

Deft looks in the current working directory for config files named deft-package.json and deft-package-local.json and merges them together, with the -local version overriding values from the other. See the example file in the top-level deft directory for the format.

Use the config file to configure a list of registries. These are used to instruct the compiler how to find and compile dylan libraries. See the Getting Started guide <https://opendylan.org/documentation/getting-started-cli/source-registries.html> for more information on registries.

Use the "show registries" Deft command to make sure the list of registries matches what you expect.