Monthly Archives: September 2016

How to Write @trusted Code in D

Steven Schveighoffer is the creator and maintainer of the dcollections and iopipe libraries. He was the primary instigator of D’s inout feature and the architect of a major rewrite of the language’s built-in arrays. He also authored the oft-recommended introductory article on the latter.


d6In computer programming, there is a concept of memory-safe code, which is guaranteed at some level not to cause memory corruption issues. The ultimate holy grail of memory safety is to be able to mechanically verify you will not corrupt memory no matter what. This would provide immunity from attacks via buffer overflows and the like. The D language provides a definition of memory safety that allows quite a bit of useful code, but conservatively forbids things that are sketchy. In practice, the compiler is not omnipotent, and it lacks the context that we humans are so good at seeing (most of the time), so there is often the need to allow otherwise risky behavior. Because the compiler is very rigid on memory safety, we need the equivalent of a cast to say “yes, I know this is normally forbidden, but I’m guaranteeing that it is fine”. That tool is called @trusted.

Because it’s very difficult to explain why @trusted code might be incorrect without first discussing memory safety and D’s @safe mechanism, I’ll go over that first.

What is Memory Safe Code?

The easiest way to explain what is safe, is to examine what results in unsafe code. There are generally 3 main ways to create a safety violation in a statically-typed language:

  1. Write or read from a buffer outside the valid segment of memory that you have access to.
  2. Cast some value to a type that allows you to treat a piece of memory that is not a pointer as a pointer.
  3. Use a pointer that is dangling, or no longer valid.

The first item is quite simple to achieve in D:

auto buf = new int[1]; 
buf[2] = 1;

With default bounds checks on, this results in an exception at runtime, even in code that is not checked for safety. But D allows circumventing this by accessing the pointer of the array:

buf.ptr[2] = 1;

For an example of the second, all that is needed is a cast:

*cast(int*)(0xdeadbeef) = 5;

And the third is relatively simple as well:

auto buf = new int[1];
auto buf2 = buf;
delete buf;  // sets buf to null
buf2[0] = 5; // but not buf2.

Dangling pointers also frequently manifest by pointing at stack data that is no longer in use (or is being used for a different reason). It’s very simple to achieve:

int[] foo()
{
    int[4] buf;
    int[] result = buf[];
    return result;
}

So simply put, safe code avoids doing things that could potentially result in memory corruption. To that end, we must follow some rules that prohibit such behavior.

Note: dereferencing a null pointer in user-space is not considered a memory safety issue in D. Why not? Because this triggers a hardware exception, and generally does not leave the program in an undefined state with corrupted memory. It simply aborts the program. This may seem undesirable to the user or the programmer, but it’s perfectly fine in terms of preventing exploits. There are potential memory issues possible with null pointers, if one has a null pointer to a very large memory space. But for safe D, this requires an unusually large struct to even begin to worry about it. In the eyes of the D language, instrumenting all pointer dereferences to check for null is not worth the performance degradation for these rare situations.

D’s @safe rules

D provides the @safe attribute that tags a function to be mechanically checked by the compiler to follow rules that should prevent all possible memory safety problems. Of course, there are cases where developers need to make exceptions in order to get some meaningful work done.

The following rules are geared to prevent issues like the ones discussed above (listed in the spec here).

  1. Changing a raw pointer value is not allowed. If @safe D code has a pointer, it has access only to the value pointed at, no others. This includes indexing a pointer.
  2. Casting pointers to any type other than void* is not allowed. Casting from any non-pointer type to a pointer type is not allowed. All other casts are OK (e.g. casting from float to int) as long as they are valid. Casting a dynamic array to a void[] is also allowed.
  3. Unions that have pointer types that overlap other types cannot be accessed. This is similar to rules 1 and 2 above.
  4. Accessing an element in or taking a slice from a dynamic array must be either proven safe by the compiler, or incur a bounds check during runtime. This even happens in release mode, when bounds checks are normally omitted (note: dmd’s option -boundscheck=off will override this, so use with extreme caution).
  5. In normal D, you can create a dynamic array from a pointer by slicing the pointer. In @safe D, this is not allowed, since the compiler has no idea how much space you actually have available via that pointer.
  6. Taking a pointer to a local variable or function parameter (variables that are stored on the stack) or taking a pointer to a reference parameter are forbidden. An exception is slicing a local static array, including the function foo above. This is a known issue.
  7. Explicit casting between immutable and mutable types that are or contain references is not allowed. Casting value-types between immutable and mutable can be done implicitly and is perfectly fine.
  8. Explicit casting between thread-local and shared types that are or contain references is not allowed. Again, casting value-types is fine (and can be done implicitly).
  9. The inline assembler feature of D is not allowed in @safe code.
  10. Catching thrown objects that are not derived from class Exception is not allowed.
  11. In D, all variables are default initialized. However, this can be changed to uninitialized by using a void initializer:
    int *s = void;

    Such usage is not allowed in @safe D. The above pointer would point to random memory and create an obvious dangling pointer.

  12. __gshared variables are static variables that are not properly typed as shared, but are still in global space. Often these are used when interfacing with C code. Accessing such variables is not allowed in @safe D.
  13. Using the ptr property of a dynamic array is forbidden (a new rule that will be released in version 2.072 of the compiler).
  14. Writing to void[] data by means of slice-assigning from another void[] is not allowed (this rule is also new, and will be released in 2.072).
  15. Only @safe functions or those inferred to be @safe can be called.

The need for @trusted

The above rules work well to prevent memory corruption, but they prevent a lot of valid, and actually safe, code. For example, consider a function that wants to use the system call read, which is prototyped like this:

ssize_t read(int fd, void* ptr, size_t nBytes);

For those unfamiliar with this function, it reads data from the given file descriptor, and puts it into the buffer pointed at by ptr and expected to be nBytes bytes long. It returns the number of bytes actually read, or a negative value if an error occurs.

Using this function to read data into a stack-allocated buffer might look like this:

ubyte[128] buf;
auto nread = read(fd, buf.ptr, buf.length);

How is this done inside a @safe function? The main issue with using read in @safe code is that pointers can only pass a single value, in this case a single ubyte. read expects to store more bytes of the buffer. In D, we would normally pass the data to be read as a dynamic array. However, read is not D code, and uses a common C idiom of passing the buffer and length separately, so it cannot be marked @safe. Consider the following call from @safe code:

auto nread = read(fd, buf.ptr, 10_000);

This call is definitely not safe. What is safe in the above read example is only the one call, where the understanding of the read function and calling context assures memory outside the buffer will not be written.

To solve this situation, D provides the @trusted  attribute, which tells the compiler that the code inside the function is assumed to be @safe, but will not be mechanically checked. It’s on you, the developer, to make sure the code is actually @safe.

A function that solves the problem might look like this in D:

auto safeRead(int fd, ubyte[] buf) @trusted
{
    return read(fd, buf.ptr, buf.length);
}

Whenever marking an entire function @trusted, consider if code could call this function from any context that would compromise memory safety. If so, this function should not be marked @trusted under any circumstances. Even if the intention is to only call it in safe ways, the compiler will not prevent unsafe usage by others. safeRead should be fine to call from any @safe context, so it’s a great candidate to mark @trusted.

A more liberal API for the safeRead function might take a void[] array as the buffer. However, recall that in @safe code, one can cast any dynamic array to a void[] array — including an array of pointers. Reading file data into an array of pointers could result in an array of dangling pointers. This is why ubyte[] is used instead.

@trusted escapes

A @trusted escape is a single expression that allows @system (the unsafe default in D) calls such as read without exposing the potentially unsafe call to any other part of the program. Instead of writing the safeRead function, the same feat can be accomplished inline within a @safe function:

auto nread = ( () @trusted => read(fd, buf.ptr, buf.length) )();

Let’s take a closer look at this escape to see what is actually happening. D allows declaring a lambda function that evaluates and returns a single expression, with the () => expr syntax. In order to call the lambda function, parentheses are appended to the lambda. However, operator precedence will apply those parentheses to the expression and not the lambda, so the entire lambda must be wrapped in parentheses to clarify the call. And finally, the lambda can be tagged @trusted as shown, so the call is now usable from the @safe context that contains it.

In addition to simple lambdas, whole nested functions or multi-statement lambdas can be used. However, remember that adding a trusted nested function or saving a lambda to a variable exposes the rest of the function to potential safety concerns! Take care not to expose the escape too much because this risks having to manually verify code that should just be mechanically checked.

Rules of Thumb for @trusted

The previous examples show that tagging something as @trusted has huge implications. If you are disabling memory safety checks, but allowing any @safe code to call it, then you must be sure that it cannot result in memory corruption. These rules should give guidance on where to put @trusted marks and avoid getting into trouble:

Keep @trusted code small

@trusted code is never mechanically checked for safety, so every line must be reviewed for correctness. For this reason, it’s always advisable to keep the code that is @trusted as small as possible.

Apply @trusted to entire functions when the unsafe calls are leaky

Code that modifies or uses data that @safe code also uses creates the potential for unsafe calls to leak into the mechanically checked portion of a @safe function. This means that portion of the code must be manually reviewed for safety issues. It’s better to mark the whole thing @trusted, as that’s more in line with the truth. This is not a hard and fast rule; for example, the read call from the earlier example is perfectly safe, even though it will affect data that is used later by the function in @safe mode.

A pointer allocated with C’s malloc in the beginning of the function, and free‘d later, could have been copied somewhere in between. In this case, the dangling pointer may violate @safe, even in the mechanically checked part. Instead, try wrapping the entire portion that uses the pointer as @trusted, or even the entire function. Alternatively, use scope guards to guarantee the lifetime of the data until the end of the function.

Never use @trusted on template functions that accept arbitrary types

D is smart enough to infer @safe for template functions that follow the rules. This includes member functions of templated types. Just let the compiler do its job here. To ensure the function is actually @safe in the right contexts, create an @safe unittest  to call it. Marking the function @trusted allows any operator overloads or members that might violate memory safety to be ignored by the safety checker! Some tricky ones to remember are postblit and opCast.

It’s still OK to use @trusted escapes here, but be very careful. Consider especially possible types that contain pointers when thinking about how such a function could be abused. A common mistake is to mark a range function or range usage @trusted. Remember that most ranges are templates, and can be easily inferred as @system when the type being iterated has a @system postblit or constructor/destructor, or is generated from a user-provided lambda.

Use @safe to find the parts you need to mark as @trusted

Sometimes, a template intended to be @safe may not be inferred @safe, and it’s not clear why. In this case, try temporarily marking the template function @safe to see where the compiler complains. That’s where @trusted escapes should be inserted if appropriate.

In some cases, a template is used pervasively, and tagging it as @safe may make too many parts break. Make a copy of the template under a different name that you mark @safe, and change the calls that are to be checked so that they call the alternative template instead.

Consider how the function may be edited in the future

When writing a trusted function, always think about how it could be called with the given API, and ensure that it should be @safe. A good example from above is making sure safeRead cannot accept an array of pointers. However, another possibility for unsafe code to creep in is when someone edits a part of the function later, invalidating the previous verification, and the whole function needs to be rechecked. Insert comments to explain the danger of changing something that would then violate safety. Remember, pull request diffs don’t always show the entire context, including that a long function being edited is @trusted!

Use types to encapsulate @trusted operations with defined lifetimes

Sometimes, a resource is only dangerous to create and/or destroy, but not to use during its lifetime. The dangerous operations can be encapsulated into a type’s constructor and destructor, marked @trusted, which allows @safe code to use the resource in between those calls. This takes a lot of planning and care. At no time can you allow @safe code to ferret out the actual resource so that it can keep a copy past the lifetime of the managing struct! It is essential to make sure the resource is alive as long as @safe code has a reference to it.

For example, a reference-counted type can be perfectly safe, as long as a raw pointer to the payload data is never available. D’s std.typecons.RefCounted cannot be marked @safe, since it uses alias this to devolve to the protected allocated struct in order to function, and any calls into this struct are unaware of the reference counting. One copy of that payload pointer, and then when the struct is free‘d, a dangling pointer is present.

This can’t be @safe!

Sometimes, the compiler allows a function to be @safe, or is inferred @safe, and it’s obvious that shouldn’t be allowed. This is caused by one of two things: either a function that is called by the @safe function (or some deeper function) is marked @trusted but allows unsafe calls, or there is a bug or hole in the @safe system. Most of the time, it is the former. @trusted is a very tricky attribute to get correct, as is shown by most of this post. Frequently, developers will mark a function @trusted only thinking of some uses of their function, not realizing the dangers it allows. Even core D developers make this mistake! There can be template functions that are inferred safe because of this, and sometimes it’s difficult to even find the culprit. Even after the root cause is discovered, it’s often difficult to remove the @trusted tag as it will break many users of the function. However, it’s better to break code that is expecting a promise of memory safety than subject it to possible memory exploits. The sooner you can deprecate and remove the tag, the better. Then insert trusted escapes for cases that can be proven safe.

If it does happen to be a hole in the system, please report the issue, or ask questions on the D forums. The D community is generally happy to help, and memory safety is a particular focus for Walter Bright, the creator of the language.

The Origins of Learning D

In ealearningdrly 2015, Adam Ruppe asked in the D forums if anyone was interested in authoring a new book for Packt Publishing, the company that published his D Cookbook. I had submitted a book proposal to Packt a few months before, one with a different concept, and had heard nothing back. So I began to mull over the idea of putting my name forward, but I was concerned about the time investment. Before I could decide, Packt contacted me with some details and an offer. With a target publication date of November 2015, I figured I had plenty of time to get it done, so I accepted. It wasn’t long before I learned how my concept of “plenty of time” was quite a bit off base.

Learning D was not the first programming book I had worked on. I coauthored Learn to Tango with D, which was published in 2008 by Apress, with three other D users. It was a book that simply aimed to introduce the language (version 1) and Tango, the community-driven alternative standard library for D1. I wrote two chapters and had nothing to do with the outline. It was a relatively easy experience that left me completely unprepared for the process of authoring an in-depth programming language book on my own. Tango was a bit controversial at the time and, though it’s no longer actively developed, a fork is still maintained and usable with modern D for those so inclined. The recently released Ocean library from Sociomantic Labs is derived from Tango.

When all the legalities were out of the way, work on the book began in earnest. Packt proposed an outline, with a handful of topics they specifically wanted me to cover. I also had to decide how to approach the book and who my target audience would be. Andrei Alexandrescu’s The D Programming Language already served as the language reference and Ali Çehreli’s Programming in D was targeting programming novices. I wanted to hit somewhere in the middle. I envisioned a young college student or recent undergraduate who, having already picked up some level of proficiency with a C-family language, was not a complete beginner, but also did not yet have the level of experience required to easily think in different languages.

Once I had an imaginary reader to talk to, I had a good idea of what I wanted to say. It was fairly easy to create two groups of features: those fundamental to become proficient enough with the language and the standard library to be productive, and those that are not essential or could be more aptly considered advanced. The former group would comprise the major focus of the book. But in addition to teaching the language, I had a general message I wanted to drive home.

Through all my years of visiting the D forums and maintaining a popular set of bindings to C libraries, I had encountered more than one new D user who was trying to program C++ or Java in D. While that approach will certainly enable some progress, it is bound to lead to compiler errors or unexpected results sooner rather than later. I explicitly pushed this message early in the book, and reiterated it each time I discussed one of the features that look like C++ or Java, but behave differently. Thinking in one language while learning another is a mistake that requires experience–it’s not the sort of thing novices do–and, as such, it’s a hard habit to break. My goal was to help minimize the pain.

I also wanted to create a sample program that demonstrated the language and library features I was discussing. My original plan was to create a new version of the program whenever a new paradigm was discussed. After gaining a false sense of confidence from completing Chapter 1 well before the deadline, Chapter 2 quickly disabused me of any thoughts that the whole book would go that way. It went well over the page budget and took longer than I had estimated, which meant the program for Chapter 2 was written over the space of a few hours during an all-night marathon. It was rightly lambasted by the technical reviewers. In the end, I scrapped the sample programs during the revision process and created a single program that evolves with new features as the book progresses. It didn’t turn out the way I had hoped, but it does show working examples of different paradigms in one program. The web app version developed in Chapter 10, which demonstrates the use of vibe.d, went more smoothly. Since it was the focus of the chapter, I was able to develop it in tandem with the text.

Speaking of the reviewers, the book would have been a mess had it not been for their valuable feedback. In the past, I had always believed authors were simply being kind when they said such a thing, but I can now attest that it is absolutely true. Packt asked me to recommend some technical reviewers, so I gave them a shortlist of people whom I knew to have strengths in areas where I was weak. John Colvin, Jonathan M. Davis, David Nadlinger, and Steven Schveighoffer came in early on, and were later joined by Kingsley Hendrickse and Ilya Yaroshenko. I was determined to be discriminating in implementing their suggestions, but they were so good that I agreed with and implemented most of them. And their criticisms were spot-on, catching coding errors, Big-O crimes, incorrect statements, and so much more. They taught me a few things I hadn’t known about D, cleared up a few misconceptions, and even spotted a couple of compiler bugs.

In the Foreword, Walter Bright says that this book, like D itself, is a labor of love. He is entirely correct. I first encountered D in 2003 and have been using it ever since. It’s just such a fun language. Though it’s a cliché to any long-time D user, I will tell anyone who cares to listen that this language is very much the sum of its parts; it’s not any one specific feature that makes D such a pleasure to use, but all of them taken together. Yes, it has its warts. Yes, it’s possible to encounter frustrating scenarios that require less-than-attractive workarounds. But, for me, my list of cons is nowhere near long enough to detract from the overall experience. I simply enjoy it. I want to see the cons list shrink and hope that more people see in the language what I see in it, so that one day ads looking for a D programmer are as common as those for other major languages. I accepted the offer to write this book as a way to contribute to that process. Most gratifyingly, I have received personal messages from a few readers letting me know that it helped them learn D. As a long time teacher, that’s a feeling I will never get tired of.

Project Highlight: Timur Gafarov

dlib-logoTo begin with, let’s be clear that Timur Gafarov is a person and not a project. The impetus for this post was an open source first-person shooter, called Atrium, that he develops and maintains. In the course of making the game, he has created a few other D projects, each of which could be the focus of its own post. So this time around, we’re going to do a plural Project Highlight and introduce you to the GitHub repository of Timur Gafarov.

When Timur first came to D six years ago, you might say it was love at first sight.

As an indie game developer with a strong bias toward graphics engines and rendering tech, I always try to keep track of modern compiled languages effective enough for writing real-time stuff. The most obvious choice in this field is C++, and I actually used it for several years until I found D in 2010. I immediately fell in love with the language’s clean, beautiful syntax, its powerful template system, the numerous built-in features absent in C++, and the rich and easy to use standard library.

Interestingly, he was actually attracted by one of the things often cited as a turn-off about D back then: the lack of libraries. It was a situation in which he saw opportunities to create things from scratch, without worrying about reinventing the wheel. At the time, DUB was not yet a thing, so the first task he set himself was coding up a build system called Cook, which he still uses sometimes instead of DUB.

After that, he was ready to start making a game. He wanted to use OpenGL, and found an existing binding in Derelict (a collection of dynamic bindings maintained by this post’s author — there also exists a collection of static bindings called Deimos) that allowed him to do so in D. With that off his plate, he next sat down to write a game engine. The first few steps in that direction resulted in a set of utility packages that coalesced into dlib.

At first, there were no clear plans or goals. After a previous period of using third-party engines, I had some experience with low-level graphics coding in C++ and just wanted to port my stuff to D for a start. I began with vector/matrix algebra and image I/O. These efforts resulted in dlib, a general purpose library.

He next turned his attention to 3D physics. Even though there were existing libraries with bindable C interfaces, like ODE (with a dynamic binding that existed then in the form of DerelictODE and a static binding in Deimos) and Newton (for which Deimos-like and Derelict-like bindings have since been created by third parties), he just couldn’t help himself. Enter dmech.

Atrium was born as part of my experiment with writing a 3D physics engine, called dmech. OK, this wasn’t strictly necessary, but the chance of being the first one to write this kind of thing in D was so attractive that I couldn’t stand it 🙂 Of course, I didn’t dare to compete with such industry standards as Bullet, but nevertheless it was an amazing experience. I’ve learned a lot.

A screenshot from Atrium.

A screenshot from Atrium.

A physics engine and utility library weren’t all he needed. That’s where DGL comes in.

The next milestone was writing a graphics engine that I call DGL. I can’t consider this step fully completed, because I’m never happy with my abstractions and design solutions. Finally, I ended up with some kind of simplified Physically-Based Rendering pipeline, Percentage Closer Filtering shadows and multipass rendering, with which I’m sort of satisfied for now.

There was a period when I had to use outdated hardware, so DGL uses OpenGL 1.x, relying on extensions to utilize modern GPU technologies. Yeah, in 2016 this sounds funny 🙂 But recently I started experimenting with OpenGL 4, so the engine is likely to be rewritten. Again!

But for Timur, the graphics system isn’t the most important part of Atrium.

It’s the collision detection and character kinematics. I think that believable character behavior and interactions with the virtual world are crucial for any realistic game. In Atrium, these are fully physics-based, with as few hacks and workarounds as possible. Rigid body dynamics natively ‘talk’ with player-controllable kinematics. That means, for example, that a character can be pushed with moving objects and can push other objects himself. A stack of dynamic boxes can be transported via a kinematic moving platform. A gravity gun can be used to move things. And so on. I’m deeply inspired by Valve’s masterpieces, Half-Life 2 and Portal, so I want to make my own ‘physical’ first person puzzle.

Working on this project has certainly been a labor of love.

It has already taken me about six years of spare-time work and it still exists only in the form of an early gameplay demo. Of course, if I’d used an existing mature engine, like Unity or UE, things would be much simpler. Constraining myself to use D for such a complex task may look strange, but it’s fun. And that’s that.

Through those years, he has learned a good deal about the ups and downs of game development with D. Particularly that ever popular bugbear known as the GC.

Modern D is a very attractive choice as a language for game development. Even the garbage collector is not a problem, because you can use object pools, custom allocators, or simply malloc and free. The key point is to know when the GC is invoked and try to avoid those cases in performance critical code. Personally, I prefer using malloc so that I can free the memory when I want, since delete has been deprecated and destroy  just releases all the references to an object instance without actually deleting it. Using manual memory management imposes some restrictions on the code–for example, you can’t use closures or D’s built-in containers–but that, again, is not a big problem. A large effort is currently underway to lessen GC usage in dlib, so that you can use it to write fully unmanaged applications with ease. It has GC-free containers, file I/O streams, image decoders, and so on.

If you are interested in game development with D, Timur’s GitHub repository should be an early point of call. Even if you aren’t making a game or a game engine, you may well find something useful in dlib. With its growing list of contributors, it’s getting a good deal of care and attention.

Thanks to Timur for taking the time to contribute to this post. We wish him luck with all of his projects!

GSoC Report: DStep

Wojciech Szęszoł is a Computer Science major at the University of Wrocław. As part of Google Summer of Code 2016, he chose to make improvements to Jacob Carlborg’s DStep, a tool to generate D bindings from C and Objective-C header files.


GSoC-icon-192It was December of last year and I was writing an image processing project for a course at my university. I would normally use Python, but the project required some custom processing, so I wasn’t able to use numpy. And writing the inner loops of image processing algorithms in plain Python isn’t the best idea. So I decided to use D.

I’ve been conscious about the existence of the D language for as long as I can remember, but I’d never convinced myself before to try it out. The first thing I needed to do was to load an image. At the time, I didn’t know that there is a DUB repository containing bindings to image loading libraries, so I started writing bindings to libjpeg by myself. It didn’t end very well, so I thought there should be a tool that will do the job for me. That’s when I found DStep and htod.

Unluckily, the capabilities of DStep weren’t satisfying (mostly the lack of any kind of support for the preprocessor) and htod didn’t run on Linux. I ended up coding my project in C++, but as GSoC (Google Summer of Code) was lurking on the horizon, I decided that I should give it a try with DStep. I began by contacting Craig Dillabaugh (Ed. Note: Craig volunteers to organize GSoC projects using D) to learn if there was any need for developing such a project. It sparked some discussion on the forum, the idea was accepted, and, more importantly, Russel Winder agreed to be the mentor of the project. After some time I needed to prepare and submit an official proposal. There was an interview and fortunately I was accepted.

The first commit I made for DStep is dated to February, 1. It was a proof of concept that C preprocessor definitions can be translated to D using libclang. Then I improved the testing framework by replacing the old Cucumber-based tests with some written in D. I made a few more improvements before the actual GSoC coding period began.

During GSoC, I added support for translation of preprocessor macros (constants and functions). It required implementing a parser for a small part of the C language as the information from libclang was insufficient. I implemented translation of comments, improved formatting of the output code (e.g. made DStep keep the spacing from C sources), fixed most of the issues from the GitHub issue list and ported DStep to Windows. While I was coding I was getting support from Jacob Carlborg. He did a great job by reviewing all of the commits I made. When I didn’t know how to accomplish something with D, I could always count on help on forum.dlang.org.

DStep was the first project of such a size that I coded in D. I enjoyed its modern features, notably the module system, garbage collector, built-in arrays, and powerful templates. I used unittest blocks a lot. It would be nice to have named unit tests, so that they can be run selectively. From the perspective of a newcomer, the lack of consistency and symmetry in some features is troubling, at least before getting used to it. For example there is a built-in hash map and no hash set, some identifiers that should be keywords starts with @ (Ed. Note: see the Attributes documentation), etc. I was very sad when I read that the in keyword is not yet fully implemented. Despite those little issues, the language served me very well overall. I suppose I will use D for my personal toy projects in the future. And for DStep of course. I have some unfinished business with it :).

I would like to encourage all students to take part in future editions of GSoC. And I must say the D Language Foundation is a very good place to do this. I learned a lot during this past summer and it was a very exciting experience.