News about Dyalog

Jun 15, 2015

Dyalog Ltd Announces Dyalog Version 14.1


Dyalog Ltd has released the latest version of its software development environment – Dyalog 14.1 – the first version that runs on Mac OS (Yosemite or later versions). Mac OS joins the growing family of supported platforms, which includes Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX, Intel-based Linux and the most recent addition, Linux on the Raspberry Pi, which was added in 2013.

CTO Morten Kromberg of Dyalog Ltd says "Dyalog is now also supported on Apple Mac computers running Mac OS. The Mac is the first platform where our APL engine is integrated with our new cross-platform Remote Integrated Development Environment (RIDE). The RIDE is making its debut as the default development environment for Apple Mac OS and Linux, but is also available under Windows to enable debugging of services and other processes that are prohibited from interacting with the desktop – or, indeed, remote debugging of Mac, Linux or UNIX processes. We consider the RIDE-based Mac OS version to be a major milestone on our journey towards making Dyalog a truly cross-platform tool, targeting phones, tablets and web-based development of analytical applications in addition to the traditional platforms that we have supported for three decades.

"In addition to portability, this release has focused heavily on performance enhancements. Dyalog 14.1 comes with speeds-ups to several primitive functions and operators. Our optimised bytecode execution engine, introduced with version 14.0, now supports selected control structures and references to global variables and functions; as a result, customers will experience a factor of two performance increase for many functions, especially when applied to small data structures.

"Our efforts are also heavily focused on the parallel computing capabilities that Dyalog offers. Our aim is to put parallel hardware at the fingertips of domain experts and software engineers alike. The futures and isolates mechanisms, which we introduced in version 14.0, have been enhanced to make it even easier to take advantage of multiple processors in a desktop or laptop and/or distribute processing across the entire network of computers.

"Dyalog is also eminently suited for Cloud hosted applications, and it is interesting to observe that, whilst APL started out as a development language for mainframe hosted applications, we have almost come full circle, now that we're seeing an increase in shared hosting".

Kromberg continues "When it comes to parallel computing, it has been an exciting challenge to develop the language in such a manner that it becomes easy to express the parallelism inherent in an application. However, the greatest challenge continues to be that we keep Dyalog in the forefront of the technical development in order to ensure that the development environment, at all times, lives up the expected technical demands in our rapidly changing world of computing. All things being equal – nothing beats APL when it comes to expressing solutions to complex problems for execution on a computer."

Dyalog's declared mission is to ensure that APL is always easily available in large and small enterprises, for academic use, or for private individuals. Dyalog is the fastest growing vendor in the space, and the Company is heavily involved in ensuring that they can facilitate easy migration from any other APL dialect to Dyalog APL. Recent migrations projects includes Swedish car manufacturer Volvo, who not only migrated to Dyalog but at the same time downsized from a mainframe to a Microsoft Windows Server run application. The project can be reviewed here.

Dyalog version 14.1 is available from http://www.dyalog.com/download-zone.htm, and there is a free Windows version available for those who would like to experiment with the language.

The company is currently running a programming contest for non-professional programmers and students through http://www.dyalogaplcompetition.com. The contest offers cash prizes to the top submissions and the deadline for submission is 16 July 2015 (see http://www.dyalog.com/student-competition.htm). The winners will be announced August 10 and the Grand Prize winner will be invited to attend Dyalog '15, the Dyalog user meeting in Sicily, Italy, 6-10 September, to present their winning solution.