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digitalmars.D - Back from the dead - How is D going?

reply Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam com.gmail> writes:
Hi everyone!

After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community 
and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000 
unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I 
should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the 
announce NG at least).
Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to 
posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that 
have come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos 
integration? 1.0 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and 
stuff, how are they going? Thanks in advance. :)


The only thread I've read from that back is the recent one about the Go 
language... that's some pretty big news!


BTW, I've moved to London, are there any other D enthusiasts around 
here? Or in UK in general? From the top of my head, since the last time 
I was around, I don't remember any major poster who was from the UK.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
Nov 13 2009
next sibling parent Bill Baxter <wbaxter gmail.com> writes:
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Bruno Medeiros
<brunodomedeiros+spam com.gmail> wrote:

 Hi everyone!

 After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community =


and

 =A0be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000 unr=


ead

 posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I should try=


 to

 check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the announce NG at
 least).
 Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to
 posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that ha=


ve

 come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos integration? 1=


.0

 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and stuff, how are the=


y

 going? Thanks in advance. :)


Welcome back!

As far as real events and not just endless NG arguments, probably the
best thing to do would be to read the last year's worth of "The One
With D" blog.

Tango and D2 are both using the same runtime now, but Tango is ported
to D2 yet, so that bit is not really resolved.
LDC still doesn't work on Windows except for some definitions of the
word "work".
Concurrency still is not done.
Now they're trying to add "safe" and "unsafe" markers in addition to
shared, __gshared, and three flavors of const.
Andrei's got a book nearly done, "The D Programming Language".   And
there's all kinda flurry to get stuff nailed down before that goes
gold.
Fixed-sized arrays are now value types.

--bb
Nov 13 2009
prev sibling next sibling parent Lutger <lutger.blijdestijn gmail.com> writes:
Bruno Medeiros wrote:


 Hi everyone!
 
 After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community
 and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000
 unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I
 should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the
 announce NG at least).
 Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to
 posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that
 have come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos
 integration? 1.0 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and
 stuff, how are they going? Thanks in advance. :)
 
 
 The only thread I've read from that back is the recent one about the Go
 language... that's some pretty big news!
 
 
 BTW, I've moved to London, are there any other D enthusiasts around
 here? Or in UK in general? From the top of my head, since the last time
 I was around, I don't remember any major poster who was from the UK.
 
 


Hi, welcome back!

Here are a couple of bullet points for you, not sure what you missed and 
what not:

- Andrei Alexandrescu is writing (has almost completed) a book on D, to be 
published around before april 2010 iirc

- Around the same time, D2 should be finished. 

- About concurrency: everything is tread-local now, except when you 
explicitly type something as shared, which is a transitive type constructor. 
Threading is not fully worked out yet. There was a proposal by Bartosz 
Milewski for a more radical race-free type system but it has not been 
accepted for D2 at least. AST macros are also not going to not make it in D2

- While Sean Kelly maintains the runtime under the name of druntime, the 
rest of tango is still separate and not ported to D2. Tango also has not 
adopted druntime. There is a recent thread about license issues, so this 
problem persists still.

- LDC seems to be going strong, at least for 32 and 64 bit linux. No windows 
(except if you can live without exceptions) and no D2 yet.

- both phobos and dmd backend are under version control in dsource. Since 
the backend source code got available, lots and lots of bugs got fixed. 

- phobos is expanding, (see Alexandrescu's work on ranges)

- dsss is not maintained, team0xf has a new build tool called xfbuild

- There are quite comprehensive bindings / wrapper for Qt called QtD, 
supporting both D1 and D2
Nov 13 2009
prev sibling next sibling parent Nick B <"nick_NOSPAM_.barbalich" gmail.com> writes:
Bruno Medeiros wrote:

 Hi everyone!
 
 After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community 
 and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000 
 unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I 
 should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the 
 announce NG at least).


There is a new 'D Windowing System' being built by Adam D Ruppe. See:
http://arsdnet.net/dws/


And a new D GUI called 'Code Poet' being built by Jeremie Pelletier. See 
his announcement on   D.announce dated  10 Nov 2009 as well as :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/codepoet/

regards

Nick B
Nov 13 2009
prev sibling next sibling parent Don <nospam nospam.com> writes:
Bruno Medeiros wrote:

 Hi everyone!
 
 After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community 
 and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000 
 unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I 
 should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the 
 announce NG at least).
 Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to 
 posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that 
 have come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos 
 integration? 1.0 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and 
 stuff, how are they going? Thanks in advance. :)


You might find this useful:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel#FutureDirections


 
 BTW, I've moved to London, are there any other D enthusiasts around 
 here? Or in UK in general? From the top of my head, since the last time 
 I was around, I don't remember any major poster who was from the UK.


Stewart Gordon, I think?
Nov 13 2009
prev sibling next sibling parent Jesse Phillips <jessekphillips gmail.com> writes:
On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:35:24 +0000, Bruno Medeiros wrote:


 Hi everyone!
 
 After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community
 and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000
 unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I
 should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the
 announce NG at least).
 Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to
 posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that
 have come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos
 integration? 1.0 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and
 stuff, how are they going? Thanks in advance. :)
 
 
 The only thread I've read from that back is the recent one about the Go
 language... that's some pretty big news!
 
 
 BTW, I've moved to London, are there any other D enthusiasts around
 here? Or in UK in general? From the top of my head, since the last time
 I was around, I don't remember any major poster who was from the UK.


Well there have been a lot of changes with the language and a lot has 
changed for the organization of information. Wiki4D received quite an 
overhaul, so you'll get to see many links from there.

Don Clugston's been working working on the newly released DMD source code 
and smashing compiler crashing bugs (ICE?)

Compilers:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/StartingWithD/Compiler

Tango vs Phobos: (Tango not available on D2.x yet)
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?StandardLib#Resolution

Annotations, properties and safety are coming to D:
http://www.llucax.com.ar/blog/blog.cgi/post/-6cf9f2f2

Precise heap scanning GC (work of David Simcha):
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?
art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=99757

"The D Programming Language" book and free chapters:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DevelopmentWithD#Books

Page about the Language development:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel

D Improvement Proposals:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs

a Complete Unofficial 1.0 specification could use help being completed:
http://www.jfbillingsley.com/dspec/

Another place you should already be aware of:
http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html
Nov 14 2009
prev sibling parent reply Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam com.gmail> writes:
Thanks everyone for the links and comments. I see a lot has happened 
meanwhile, and I have a lot to catch up (annotations, safety features, 
concurrency changes like thread-local by default and whatnot, and other 
minor things)

http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel#FutureDirections
Reading this I like a lot of the minor changes coming in. Like static 
arrays becoming value types. Or AAs and complex types moving from 
language to library, I think its good to make the language simpler 
whenever no significant amount of power or usefulness is lost (although 
I guessing the powers that be only agreed to move this to the library 
because now D's metaprogramming features, as well as new struct features 
and others, make it more feasible to implement these types in the library).
"Remove C-style declarations" -> again, quite good, simplifying language 
without any loss in power.

"Remove typedef" Hum, Im curious about this one, but I'll read the 
appropriate threads later when I have the time.

I also like this blog post as well:
http://www.jfbillingsley.com/blog/?p=53

Lutger wrote:

 Hi, welcome back!

 Here are a couple of bullet points for you, not sure what you missed and
 what not:

 - Andrei Alexandrescu is writing (has almost completed) a book on D, 


to be

 published around before april 2010 iirc

 - Around the same time, D2 should be finished.


Interesting. Does that mean that the D's design with regards to 
concurrency will be considered finished? (or that at least no major 
changes are expected?) And that D's designers (Andrei & co.) are happy 
with it?
I was thinking that D2 would take longer to be finished, but it is good 
that it gets done soon. This way maybe we can start moving away from the 
current limbo state were the core majority of libraries and tools are 
pending in D1, which seems to be one of the great roadblocks at the 
moment for D's growth and development.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
Nov 20 2009
parent Don <nospam nospam.com> writes:
Bruno Medeiros wrote:

 Thanks everyone for the links and comments. I see a lot has happened 
 meanwhile, and I have a lot to catch up (annotations, safety features, 
 concurrency changes like thread-local by default and whatnot, and other 
 minor things)
 
 http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel#FutureDirections
 Reading this I like a lot of the minor changes coming in. Like static 
 arrays becoming value types. Or AAs and complex types moving from 
 language to library, I think its good to make the language simpler 
 whenever no significant amount of power or usefulness is lost (although 
 I guessing the powers that be only agreed to move this to the library 
 because now D's metaprogramming features, as well as new struct features 
 and others, make it more feasible to implement these types in the library).


Exactly. They're also an important test: are the built-in features 
*really* good enough to implement all this stuff?


 "Remove C-style declarations" -> again, quite good, simplifying language 
 without any loss in power.
 
 "Remove typedef" Hum, Im curious about this one, but I'll read the 
 appropriate threads later when I have the time.
 
 I also like this blog post as well:
 http://www.jfbillingsley.com/blog/?p=53
 
 Lutger wrote:
  >
  > Hi, welcome back!
  >
  > Here are a couple of bullet points for you, not sure what you missed and
  > what not:
  >
  > - Andrei Alexandrescu is writing (has almost completed) a book on D, 
 to be
  > published around before april 2010 iirc
  >
  > - Around the same time, D2 should be finished.
  >
 
 Interesting. Does that mean that the D's design with regards to 
 concurrency will be considered finished? (or that at least no major 
 changes are expected?) And that D's designers (Andrei & co.) are happy 
 with it?


Anything which is written in Andrei's book is a permanent feature of the 
language. Hence the current rush to fix up the loose ends and remove 
cruft. There are still a few unresolved issues with operator overloading 
and with concurrency, and with aspects of the safe-D system.


 I was thinking that D2 would take longer to be finished, but it is good 
 that it gets done soon. This way maybe we can start moving away from the 
 current limbo state were the core majority of libraries and tools are 
 pending in D1, which seems to be one of the great roadblocks at the 
 moment for D's growth and development.


Definitely. After the book is published, the emphasis will switch to the 
libraries, bug fixes, and the rest of the tool chain.
Nov 22 2009