• Mike Parker (122/122) Jun 06 2022 The monthly meeting for May 2022, took place on May 6th at 14:00
• max haughton (4/8) Jun 06 2022 Note that Razvan's PR fixes the issue with synchronized by
• Guillaume Piolat (3/13) Jun 06 2022 Thanks for following through with SIMD bugs!

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

The monthly meeting for May 2022, took place on May 6th at 14:00 
UTC. The meeting lasted a little under an hour. The following 
people attended:

* Walter Bright
* Iain Buclaw
* Ali Çehreli
* Max Haughton
* Martin Kinkelin
* Mathias Lang
* Razvan Nitu
* Mike Parker


Iain gave us an update on the release of GDC 12.1. He talked 
about some of the work he put into getting it ready. Now that he 
is also involved in releasing DMD, he was extremely busy prepping 
for both. In the future, he's going to streamline his process so 
that it's less stressful.


In the April meeting, Atila noted that he wanted to enable 
`-preview=nosharedaccess` by default, but [was blocked because it 
didn't work with 
syncronized](https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22626). Max 
reported that he had looked into it. He said he tried to have the 
compiler cast away `shared` in `synchronized` blocks, but this 
was defeated by the frontend optimizer stripping the cast away.

Razvan [has subsequently submitted a 
PR](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/14143) to fix the issue.

Max also wanted to make sure Walter was aware of a SIMD issue in 
DMD. [Walter had already submitted a PR for 
it](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/14081) the day before the 
meeting. This prompted a discussion about what the problem was, 
Iain's attempt to find it, and a tangential discussion about 
FreeBSD tests.


Mathias let us know he was about to officially start his new job 
with Symmetry. He also talked a bit about this [Argument 
Dependent Attributes DIP](https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/pull/198) 
in the PR queue (a.k.a. Draft Review). He wants to have a fully 
working implementation that he can test out before moving forward 
to the first Community Review round. He currently has a partial 
implementation and will let me know when it's ready.


Martin noted that cooperation on D 2.100.0 was great, and 
acknowledged that Iain had the most stressful time of it. He said 
the release was in good shape, as it had been tested with 
Symmetry's codebase and all was well. The beta of LDC 1.30 was 
released a little over a week after the meeting.

He reported he had been trying out the PGO build feature on DMD. 
He found a huge effect on binary size. He was planning also to do 
some performance comparisons.


I noted that I plan to enter the foundation's YouTube channel 
into the YouTube Partner Program so we can use it to raise money. 
Before that, I want to increase the variety of content we put out 
and the frequency at which we publish. I told everyone that to 
that end I'd like to start putting out interviews, and they 
agreed to participate.

I have since recorded and published an interview with [Razvan and 
Dennis in our 'D Community Q & A' 
playlist](https://youtu.be/nvo7wzjVDQc). I'll publish more in 
that format, and also in a longer form 'D Community Discussions' 
format, with Walter, Atila, Iain, Martin, and others in the 
coming months.


Walter said his next issue was the C preprocessor in ImportC. He 
had some PRs that hadn't been merged and it was slowing him down. 
Iain said that he had not merged those yet because he thought it 
would be better for them to go into the next release. Razvan 
noted that he was monitoring Walter's PRs, but most of the time 
would like a second or even third opinion on Walter's code (and 
he did merge one of the preprocessor PRs while this discussion 
was in progress).

In the ensuing discussion (which took up a significant chunk of 
the meeting), Walter said he has no special attachment to the 
code he's writing for preprocessor support. Iain, Martin, and Max 
want something more sophisticated (e.g., something that detects 
preprocessor support rather than calling out to specific 
preprocessors), and he's all for it. But right now, he wants 
something that just works so he can make forward progress. If 
something better comes along, he's happy for it to replace his 
implementation.

This segued into a discussion about importing header files. 
Martin brought up the current approach of importing C symbols 
into local modules that are generated per compiler invocation. 
This can be a problem with a large codebase like Symmetry's that 
has a large number of foreign language dependencies, and the same 
headers can be imported multiple times all over the place: the 
result would be huge object files, each having its own definition 
of the same structs, their `TypeInfo`s, their `.init` symbols, 
and so on.

Iain agreed, noting that if you, for example, import `tgmath.h` 
and `math.h`, which `#include` each other, then calling e.g., 
`sin` will result in a conflict. He suggested the way to handle 
this is that ImportC symbols, rather than going into a module 
space, should go into a global ImportC module. Each imported C 
file or header file is then appended to that module. This would 
also prevent the potential problem of non-identifier characters 
(illegal in D module names; Iain noted that dashes are a big one) 
appearing in C header file names.

Martin said that one problem with that approach is that a D 
module would have access to symbols it didn't import. He 
suggested the ideal solution would be for each header to have its 
own module that doesn't change from one invocation of the 
compiler to the next.

Walter closed by letting us know he was heading to Poland for a 
three-city speaking tour as part of the Code Europe Conference.


Ali said he was scheduled to speak to a class at Beykoz 
University, and that he was planning to use the opportunity to 
promote D.

At work, the project he was using D for has slowed down and will 
not be coming back. He said they might use D for other projects 
in the future.



Our next monthly meeting is scheduled for Friday, June 10, at 
14:00 UTC. The vision document is the main item on the agenda, 
and I expect it to take up most of the oxygen. We'll review the 
current draft and decide what to cut, what to keep, what to add, 
etc. My expectation after that meeting is that it will be on me 
to make the revisions, after which I'll email the members for 
final feedback, then make any final revisions, then publish. It 
should be ready before DConf, the end of June at the earliest.

max haughton <maxhaton gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 6 June 2022 at 08:44:32 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 The monthly meeting for May 2022, took place on May 6th at 
 14:00 UTC. The meeting lasted a little under an hour. The 
 following people attended:

 [...]

Note that Razvan's PR fixes the issue with synchronized by 
turning the check off rather than fixing the assumption inside 
the compiler. It still breaks LDC atomics for example.

Guillaume Piolat <first.last gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 6 June 2022 at 08:44:32 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:


 Our next monthly meeting is scheduled for Friday, June 10, at 
 14:00 UTC. The vision document is the main item on the agenda, 
 and I expect it to take up most of the oxygen. We'll review the 
 current draft and decide what to cut, what to keep, what to 
 add, etc. My expectation after that meeting is that it will be 
 on me to make the revisions, after which I'll email the members 
 for final feedback, then make any final revisions, then 
 publish. It should be ready before DConf, the end of June at 
 the earliest.

Thanks for following through with SIMD bugs!
Love seeing the Foundation reports.