Category Archives: News

D News May ’22: D 2.100.0; GDC & LDC Releases; DConf ’22 Schedule Published & Early-Bird Registration Ends

May was a busy month in D land. Early on, a major milestone release of GDC, the GCC-based D compiler, hit the virtual shelves. It was followed in middle of the month by the release of D 2.100.0 along with a DMD release, the reference D compiler, of the same version. That was immediately follwed by a beta release of the LLVM-based D compiler, LDC, version 1.30.0. Finally, the latter half of the month saw the publication of the DConf ’22 schedule, we found a sponsor for the DConf tradition of BeerConf, and May 31st marks the final day of DConf ’22 early-bird registration.

A video version of this blog post is available on the D Language Foundation YouTube channel.

D 2.100.0

This latest release of DMD comes to us courtesy of 41 contributors who brought us 22 major changes and 179 fixed Bugzilla issues. Although the community attached a bit of significance to the 2.100.0 version number, there isn’t anything overly exciting in the changelog. This is largely a house-cleaning release—a number of deprecation periods that should have already ended have been terminated— but there are a couple of interesting additions to the language.

D1-style operator overloading

One of these is the deprecation of D1-style operator overloads. Originally, these were designed to make their purpose clear. Want to overload the addition operator? Then implement opAdd. What to overload the multiplication operator? Then implement opMul. Walter took this approach with operator overloading because of one of the major complaints about the feature in C++: people often overload an operator to do something different from what it is expected to do. An example: overloading the + operator to append rather than perform addition. Walter’s reasoning was that if the intent of the operator is included in the name of the function, then anyone overloading it to do something different is essentially violating its contract. Perhaps it would encourage people to stick to the intent.

No one can say for sure if Walter’s approach worked like he hoped, but a more generic design was implemented in D2, and this is the approach all D code must use today. The D1 operators were kept around largely to ease porting D1 code to D2, with the intention that they would one day be deprecated. It finally happened in D 2.088.0, which was released in the fall of 2019. Following the deprecation process, the deprecation period should have ended with 2.098.0 (the first release after 10 non-patch releases including the deprecation).

delete

The delete keyword was another D1 feature that was ultimately axed in D2. It was deprecated in D 2.079.0, which was released in the spring of 2018. This was something that had long been planned (see the deprecation page for the rationale), and its use had been discouraged for some time.

Ndelete would both destroy an object instance (call its destructors) and release the memory allocated for it by the GC. Now, we use the destroy function from the object module which is imported by default in all D programs. This will call the destructor on an instance and optionally reset the instance to its default .init state. The GC will then free the memory allocated for the instance when necessary, or the programmer can do it manually via GC.free static member function in core.memory.

@mustuse

Paul Backus took DIP 1038 through the review process from beginning to end. Initially, it introduced an @nodiscard attribute for functions and types. During the Formal Assessment after the review rounds were completed, Walter and Átila were willing to approve it with changes. The final version renamed the attribute to @mustUse and restricted its application to structs and unions.

The feature was implemented in D 2.100.0 as @mustuse, and is now available to use in your D code. When a type marked with the attribute is the result of an expression, the result cannot be ignored.

.tupleof for static arrays

Many D programmers are familiar with the .tupleof property of structs, which is particularly useful when interfacing with C libraries:

struct Circle {
    float x, y;
    float radius;
    ubyte r, g, b, a;
}

@nogc nothrow
extern(C) void draw_circle (
    float cx, float cy, float radius,
    ubyte r, ubyte g, ubyte b, ubyte a
);

void foo() {
    Circle c = makeCircle();
    draw_circle(c.tupleof);
}

Now we can do the same thing with static arrays:

void foo(int, int, int) { /* ... */ }

int[3] ia = [1, 2, 3];
foo(ia.tupleof); // same as `foo(1, 2, 3);

float[3] fa;
//fa = ia; // error
fa.tupleof = ia.tupleof;
assert(fa == [1F, 2F, 3F]);

DConf ’22

DConf ’22 is happening in London, August 1 4. If you haven’t registered yet and you’re reading this on or before May 31st, then register now to take advantage of the 15% early-bird discount. The schedule is online and BeerConf is a go!

DConf ’22 schedule

We love to see and hear first-time speakers at DConf, whether it’s their first conference talk ever or their first DConf talk. This year, we have 11 first-time DConf speakers, 12 if you include our invited keynote speaker Roberto Ierusalimschy (the head designer of the Lua programming language). This is awesome!

The DConf ’22 schedule is set up as follows:

  • three keynotes: two from the language maintainers, one from our guest speaker
  • two panels: the traditional DConf Ask Us Anything involving the language maintainers, and a panel on Programming Language Design
  • a Lightning Talks session
  • 15 presentations (11 of which are from first-time DConf speakers)

We’re limiting the talks to 45 minutes this year so that we’ll have more time to mingle between sessions. One of the talks on Day 3 is slated for 25–30 minutes, so we’ve slotted it such that we have a longer lunch that day.

The schedule (excluding the keynotes, as the details of those haven’t yet been provided) has a loose theme. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do:

  • Day One is mostly status reports and tutorials
  • Day Two is largely intermediate to advanced and heavy on the tech
  • Day Three is about the D ecosystem

All of the talks will be livestreamed and recorded, so they’ll be available on our YouTube channel at some point after the conference has ended. Still, DConf is about more than just the talks, as Razvan Nitu and Dennis Korpel noted in an interview. It’s about getting to know in person the people we encounter online in our regular D community interactions. As Razvan said and I can attest, your perspective will surely change after you can match the internet handles with living, breathing, human beings with whom you’ve interacted in person.

So register!

Early-bird registration ends

May 31st is the last day of early-bird registration. With the 15% discount and 20% VAT, the total is $423.30 USD. We also show the GBP equivalent on the site, based on the HMRC exchange rate for the current month, and accept payments in GBP through PayPal. On June 1st, the general registration rate of $498.00 USD (including 20% VAT) kicks in.

If you are a student, there’s a flat rate of $120.00 USD (including 20% VAT). Email social@dlang.org to take advantge of it.

We also offer a flat rate of $240.00 USD (including 20% VAT) for major open source contributors. The keyword here is major. It’s not something for which we can set specific criteria, and we don’t really want to provide examples that may discourage inquiries. If you would like to see if you qualify for this discount, please email social@dlang.org, and we’ll let you know.

Finally, we also offer a hardship rate. If you would like to attend DConf but can’t afford the registration, just email social@dlang.org and we’ll see about helping you out. We can’t help you with transportation, just the registration.

BeerConf

BeerConf is a DConf tradition going back to the very beginning, though we didn’t call it that back then. Every year, we would designate an “official” hotel somewhere in the vicinity of the venue. This would be our gathering spot in the evenings, usually in the hotel lobby or bar. Typically, would people break off into groups for dinner, then several of them would wander over to the gathering spot to hang out and chat, usually over beers. At DConf 2017, Ethan Watson branded this gathering BeerConf and the name has stuck.

At DConf 2019 in London, we couldn’t find a suitable hotel to select as the site of BeerConf. Instead, we hired out the upper floor of a pub close to the venue, thanks to the sponsorship of Mercedes Benz Research and Development North America. For DConf ’22, we’re back in the same general area, and so we again have to hire out a pub.

The 2019 pub was a bit crowded for us, and is a bit too far of a walk from our ’22 venue, so we’ve got our eyes on another pub within walking distance of the venue and near some of the budget hotels listed at dconf.org. What we’ve been missing is funding.

That has changed, thanks to Funkwerk! With their sponsorship, we’re able to cover the minimum spend the pub asks for the each of the evenings of August 1 3. This means that DConf attendees dropping by this pub on those nights can order food and drinks (alcoholic and or otherwise) for free until the DConf tab runs out. We’ll have a separate tab for each night so that we don’t blow it all in one go.

Unfortunately, I can’t announce the specifics about the pub just yet. Our DConf host, Symmetry Investments, is handling the arrangements for us since they’re in London and we aren’t. Once I receive confirmation that the deal is set, I’ll announce all of the details in the forums, here on the blog, and at dconf.org. So keep your ears open!

Thanks again to Funkwerk for helping us out.

Next time

The next big news roundup will come in late August or early September, but I’ll keep the blog updated with announcements before DConf as they come. If you are planning to attend DConf, then I’m looking forward to seeing you in London. And if you aren’t, then change your plans!

D News Jan-Mar 2022: SAOC 2021, D 2.099.0, DConf ’22

Digital Mars D logo

The first three months of 2022 brought some major milestones:

  • Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021 came to an end on January 15, but the judges didn’t render a decision until the middle of February. And what a surprise it was!
  • The D Language Foundation announced in January that we were hiring for a vacant position sponsored by Symmetry Investments, and in February we found the person to fill it.
  • Also in February, we made a long-awaited announcement regarding DConf.
  • In early March, D 2.099.0 was released.

That’s a pretty solid start to 2022, and most of it was made possible thanks to the generous contributions of Symmetry Investments. If you’re looking for a job, Symmetry is always hiring, including D programmers!

And now on with the news.

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

We started SAOC 2021 with five participants, each working on projects that would be of value to the D community. Three of them were unable to make it to the end. So it came down to two: Teodor Dutu and Luís Ferreira. Teodor was working on converting DRuntime hooks to templates, and Luís on getting support for D into LLDB, the LLVM debugger.

SAOC is sponsored by Symmetry Investments. Each year, participants promise to work on their projects at least 20 hours per week across four month-long milestones. At the end of each of the first three milestones, a panel of judges evaluates their progress to decide if they pass or fail. A passing participant is awarded a $1000 payment and allowed to continue in the next milestone. A failing participant might be given a reduced payment or none at all, and removed from the event or given a warning, depending on the circumstances leading to the failure. At the end of the fourth milestone, the judges evaluate the overall progress of each participant across the entire event and select one to receive a final $1000 payment and a free trip to DConf.

For the first time in four editions of the event, the SOAC 2021 judges were unable to agree on who should receive the final rewards. It was a three-judge panel, each of whom is a veteran of every edition of SAOC: Jon Colvin, Átila Neves, and Robert Schadek. Two of them split, and the third felt there wasn’t enough to make either of the two participants stand out above the other. Teodor and Luís both did their work, wrote detailed milestone reports, and kept up with their forum updates to the same degree. So the conflicted judge took a proposal to Laeeth Isharc of Symmetry: why not award both candidates the final payment and the DConf trip?

Congratulations to Teodor and Luís on being the first dual recipients of the final SAOC reward. They have continued working on their projects, and we look forward to seeing the work they do in the future. Thanks to all of the SAOC participants, mentors, and judges, and to Symmetry Investments for sponsoring the event every year.

The New Pull Request and Issue Manager

For over a year, Razvan Nitu has been working hard at closing Bugzilla issues and merging pull requests in his role as our Pull Request and Issue Manager. His position is sponsored by Symmetry Investments, which provided funding for two such positions. Unfortunately, real-world circumstances conspired to prevent the person selected for the second position from filling it, so it remained vacant through most of 2021.

At the beginning of this year, Symmetry committed to continuing funding for both positions (as well as a different position, that of my assistant, filled by Max Haughton). In January, we put out a call for applications. In February, we announced that Dennis Korpel was selected for the job. His proven track record as a volunteer contributor to the core D repositories made him the top contender.

Dennis officially started his new job on March 1, and he hit the ground running. We’re happy to have him on board.

Tell them about it–#dbugfix

Razvan and Dennis are here to make sure the bugs are fixed and pull requests are merged. If you have an issue that’s bugging you because it’s been open for ages, or if you feel like a pull request should be getting more attention, let them know! That’s what they’re here for.

One way you can do that is by tweeting the issue number along with #dbugfix. We initiated this hashtag a while back so that D users could bring attention to specific issues, but then the hard part was finding someone with the time and inclination to fix it. Now, with both Razvan and Dennis paid to make sure issues get fixed, the hard part is a lot easier. You can also post about issues in the forums or email social@dlang.org, and I will make sure that they see it.

Razvan and Dennis have their criteria for deciding their priorities in the absence of input, but if you bring an issue or PR to their attention, they will work to resolve it as quickly as they can.

D 2.099.0

Version 2.099.0 of DMD, the reference D compiler, was released on March 6. This is a massive release, containing 20 major changes and 221 closed Bugzilla issues from 100 contributors. Some highlights from this release: D modules can be imported into C code via ImportC; D now has throw expressions; and PE/COFF output is now the default in DMD on Windows. See the changelog for the complete list.

Import modules in C source code with ImportC

ImportC is proving to be a valuable addition to D. Once all the kinks are ironed out and a solution for handling C preprocessor directives is implemented, the need for bindings to C libraries will largely disappear—you’ll be able to bring C headers, and compile C source files, directly into your D programs without any external tools.

As of D 2.099.0, you can also bring D modules directly into C files via the __import keyword.

// dsayhello.d
import core.stdc.stdio : puts;

extern(C) void helloImport() {
    puts("Hello __import!");
}
// dhelloimport.c
__import dsayhello;
__import core.stdc.stdio : puts;

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    helloImport();
    puts("Cool, eh?");
    return 0;
}

Compile with:

dmd dhelloimport.c dsayhello.d

You can also use it to import C modules that have been compiled via ImportC:

// csayhello.c
__import core.stdc.stdio : puts;

void helloImport() {
    puts("Hello _import!");
}
// chelloimport.c
__import csayhello;
__import core.stdc.stdio : puts;

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    helloImport();
    puts("Cool, eh?");
    return 0;
}

Compile with:

dmd chelloimport.c csayhello.c

The throw expression has been implemented

For all of D’s lifetime, throw has been a statement and only a statement. It couldn’t be used in expressions because expressions must have a type, and since throw doesn’t return a value, there was no suitable type. This prevented it from being used with the following syntax:

(string err) => throw new Exception(err);

And required this form instead:

(string err) { throw new Exception(err); }

DIP 1034, which introduced a bottom type to the language, provided the means to enable throw expressions: when “a throw statement is seen as an expression returning a bottom type”. As of D 2.099.0, the following code snippet compiles:

void foo(int function() f) {}

void main() {
    foo(() => throw new Exception());
}

PE/COFF is the default DMD output on Windows

For many years, DMD outputs object files in the OMF format on Windows. There’s a story behind this, a large part of it related to the culture of software development on Windows, but it can be summarized in two bullet points:

  • Walter Bright already had a C compiler backend that generated OMF output, a license to distribute OMF link libraries for the Win32 API, and a linker that understands OMF (OPTLINK).
  • There was no de facto system linker on Windows when he started working on D in 1999, so he could not rely on a specific linker being installed.

Reusing the compiler backend and the linker allowed Walter to distribute DMD as a compiler that worked out of the box, without the need to install any further development tools. He felt this was important for D’s early adoption. The downside was that it also restricted DMD on Windows to 32-bit. Eventually, he had to support PE/COFF and require the Microsoft linker in order to support 64-bit output, and he implemented PE/COFF 32-bit at the same time, but he was adamant that DMD continue to work out of the box for those who didn’t want to install the Microsoft Build Tools (for the linker) and Windows SDK (for the Win32 link libraries).

Eventually, OPTLINK started showing its age. Linker errors became more common as D codebases grew. There were calls to enable PE/COFF by default. Finally, someone raised the idea of shipping the LLVM linker, LLD, along with link libraries generated from the MinGW project. This would allow DMD to eventually default to PE/COFF while maintaining the out-of-the-box experience.

DMD has been shipping with LLD for several releases, and it seems enough of the kinks have been worked out that it has been ready to become the default for a while now. Nicholas Wilson finally took the step to make that happen, Walter eventually gave it his blessing, and now PE/COFF is the default DMD output on Windows.

Practically, this means that the -m32mscoff switch has been deprecated, -m32 now specifies PE/COFF, and the new switch -m32omf can be used to produce OMF output if needed (but its OMF support will eventually be dropped). The -m64 switch has always produced PE/COFF output, so has not changed.

LDC

The beta release of LDC 1.29.0 was announced on March 10. This version of the LLVM-based D compiler is based on D 2.099.0+. It includes support for LLVM 13, no longer defaults to the ld.gold linker on Linux (LLD is recommended), and includes a breaking change for the extern(D) ABI. See the full release log for details.

DConf ’22 in London

After an unexpected and unwanted hiatus, DConf is returning to the real world! Hosted once again by Symmetry Investments, we’ll be in London, Aug 1–4, 2022. We’re currently accepting submissions and early-bird registration is open.

Guest keynote speaker

Our guest speaker this year is Roberto Ierusalimschy, Associate Professor at the PUC-Rio Department of Informatics and head designer of the Lua programming language. We’re excited that he’s able to join us. Several D community members have used or are using Lua in their D projects, including the gas dynamics toolkit at the University of Queensland that its maintainers wrote about on this blog. (You can also count me in that group. I’ve used Lua in different capacities over the years, and I maintain a set of D bindings for Lua’s C API).

Roberto was the mentor who shepherded the Origins of the D Programming Language paper through the HOPL IV conference, so he already has a connection to the D community.

I don’t know yet if his talk will be related to Lua, but I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

Registration

Early-bird registration is open until May 31. The base early-bird rate is $352.75 ($423.30 after applying 20% VAT), which is 15% off the general registration of $415 ($498 with 20% VAT). We offer a student discount, a discount for major open source contributors, and a hardship rate. You can register now or learn about the discounted rates at dconf.org.

Talks

At past editions of DConf, we’ve allotted talks in 50-minute blocks with 10-minute breaks in between. This year, we’re cutting that down: we’d like to keep the talks no longer than 40–45 minutes. Part of the magic of DConf is the time spent interacting face-to-face with other D enthusiasts, so it only makes sense to make as much room for that as we can while still allowing for educational and informative presentations.

If you have something related to the D programming language that you’d like to share with the world, please send in a submission. Don’t know what to talk about? Then heed Ali Çehreli, from one of his DConf Online 2020 Q & A sessions:

Coming up with an idea for a talk is as simple as the way you use D. Just look at your code, and it makes a presentation…

If you have used the D programming language, then you have material for a talk: describe your project; talk about specific problems you solved or interesting ways in which you’ve employed language features; expound on the ups and downs of your experience learning D so that others can benefit; and so on. Take a look at the DConf and DConf Online talks available on our YouTube channel for inspiration. Even if you’ve never presented at a conference, we encourage you to send us a submission! Several D community members have given their first presentation at DConf, and we are always happy to see more.

The worst that can happen when you submit a talk is that it isn’t accepted. But if it is accepted, then you’ll be entitled to reimbursement for your transportation to and from London, and your lodging for the five nights of the conference. You get to hang out with people who share your interest in D and most of your expenses are covered, with nothing to lose if your talk isn’t accepted.

Don’t let doubt or hesitation hold you back. You can find submission details at dconf.org.

Venue

DConf ’22 is taking place a nifty venue between Moorgate and Liverpool Street Stations called CodeNode. All of our talks will be in their CTRL room on the first floor, and we’ll have the basement ESC room to ourselves for mingling between talks and during lunch. They have table tennis and foosball tables, and plenty of space in which to chill.

CodeNode isn’t far from our DConf 2019 venue, so the same budget hotels we stayed at then are also within walking distance this year. You can find a list of those and several other budget hotels in the area at dconf.org.

BeerConf!

For every edition of DConf before 2019, we designated one area hotel as the official gathering spot. Many attendees would take rooms there, and a number of us would gather in the evenings in the hotel lobby or bar to chat over drinks and snacks. In one of our Berlin editions, Ethan Watson coined the term “BeerConf” to refer to these evening meetups. In 2019, we couldn’t find a suitable hotel in which to gather, so we hired space in a pub near the venue. When DConf was canceled in 2020, a couple of community members hosted an online BeerConf to make up for the loss of the real-world version, and they’ve been hosting it every month since.

This year, since we’re back in the same part of London, we’re again looking for a space we can rent for BeerConf. We’ve got our eyes on a couple of spaces, and we’re working to secure funding. I hope to have an update on that before the end of April.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the D Announce forum for news of our monthly online version of BeerConf, and consider picking up a BeerConf shirt from our DLang Swag Emporium!

Looking ahead

We’re looking forward to the rest of 2022. One of our big goals for this year is to lay the groundwork for bringing more structure and organization to the D ecosystem. The PR/Issue managers have made a big difference and brought order to a chaotic contribution process, but we still have a long way to get to where we’d like to be.

Soon, I’ll start publishing tutorials on the foundation’s YouTube channel. These tutorials are going to cover more than just the language syntax and semantics. They’ll also dive into the tools we use as D programmers: compilers, linkers, loaders, object files, etc. These days, it’s not unsual for a programmer new to D to have gone years without ever touching a programming language that uses the same compile-link model. Questions about static linking errors, or confusion about compiler vs. linker errors, are not uncommon. These tutorials will be short and focused on specific topics, and will hopefully serve as a means for new D programmers to up their game with the tools they use.

Once I’ve uploaded the tutorials, I’ll apply for our channel to join the YouTube Partner Program so that we can start raising money from the channel. We’re eligible now, but I don’t want to apply until I’ve established a more frequent pattern of updates.

On that note, I’d like to remind you that the D Language Foundation is available to select as a charity for the Amazon Smile program. When you shop via smile.amazon.com, selecting the D Language Foundation as your preferred charity allows us to receive a small percentage of your payment. If you shop at Amazon, it’s an easy way to support the D Language Foundation. You can find browser extensions that will redirect you to smile.amazon.com every time you visit amazon.com, such as Amazon Smile Redirect, which is available for Chrome/Edge and for Firefox. (Amazon Smile charities are domain-specific, so the D Language Foundation is only available through Amazon’s .com domain).

You can also support us by shopping at the DLang Swag Emporium or donating directly via one of the options listed at dlang.org.

We can’t wait to see you in London!

New Year DLang News: Hello 2022

Digital Mars D logo

For many people around the world, 2021 is a year they’d like to forget. The ongoing pandemic has touched all of our lives indirectly, but for too many, including some in the D community, it has had a more direct impact. We wish a full recovery for those of you who have been physically or emotionally affected by the virus. Please don’t forget: the D community is a network of people located around the globe. We are linked by our interest in the D programming language, but we are people before we are D programmers. If you find yourself in circumstances that disrupt any commitments you have in the community, it’s nothing to fret over. Get it sorted and we’ll be here when you get back. And if you need help to get it sorted, there are many among us willing to help if they can. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Collectively, 2021 was a pretty good year for D. Some highlights:

A small amount of the work done in 2021 was paid for. The rest was carried out by volunteers, without whom the D programming language would not be where it is today. On behalf of the D Language Foundation, thanks again to all of our contributors, large and small, for all that you do.

Now for some updates to lead us into 2022.

We’re hiring

Symmetry Investments has informed us that they will continue sponsoring the three positions they started sponsoring last year. Razvan Nitu will continue in his role as a Pull Request Manager, and Max Haughton will go on as a general purpose assistant. The second Pull Request Manager role is currently vacant. We are looking for someone to fill it.

The position pays $25,000 USD per year. The ideal candidate is someone who:

  • is familiar with git, GitHub, and Bugzilla;
  • is familiar enough with D to be able to review simple pull requests;
  • is able to recognize when more specialized reviews are required and
  • is able to proofread English text (for reviewing documentation and web site pull requests).

The person who fills the position will work closely with Razvan Nitu. Examples of the role’s responsibilities include:

  • ensuring all pull requests follow procedure;
  • reviewing simple pull requests;
  • finding appropriate reviewers for more complex pull requests;
  • ensuring that pull requests are reviewed in a timely manner;
  • reviving stale pull requests;
  • coordinating between pull request submitters and reviewers to prevent pull requests from going stale;
  • closing pull requests that are no longer valid;
  • identifying Bugzilla issues that are duplicates or invalid;
  • identifying Bugzilla issues that are candidates for bounties;
  • publicizing Bugzilla issues in need of a champion and
  • other related tasks.

We are hoping to hire from within the D community, though we will accept queries from anyone. If you are interested in taking on the role, please send your resume to social@dlang.org.

Symmetry Investments is hiring

Symmetry Investments is looking for people to fill a number of roles. Their monthly job announcement at HackerNews lists those roles along with qualifications, details on how to apply, and more. If you think you don’t qualify because you lack a degree or haven’t built up a history of experience, please pay special attention to the following lines from the job announcement:

We look for virtues and capabilities over only experience and credentials although those things aren’t a disadvantage. Do not let a lack of credentials or qualifications prevent you from applying.

They are hiring for full-time, fixed-term contracts with flexible hours, with the possibility for both remote work and sponsorship for a visa in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Jersey.

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

Milestone 4 of SAOC 2021 kicked off on December 15th. As this point, only two participants remain eligible for the final Milestone 4 reward, but four of the original five projects are on the road to completion.

  • Replace DRuntime hooks with templates – Teodor Dutu has been steadily making progress on his project and has faced some tough challenges along the way. He successfully completed Milestones 1 – 3 and is continuing the project through Milestone 4.
  • Implement support for D in LLVM Debugger (LLDB) – Luís Ferreira has also faced some hard problems in passing Milestones 1 – 3 and continues his work as well. One major step in his progress: he has been granted commit access to LLVM and is now part of the team that reviews, accepts, and merges D-related code into the LLVM tree.
  • Rethinking the default class hierarchyRobert Aron submitted a DIP for the ProtoObject at the end of Milestone 1. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete SAOC Milestone 3, but we will launch the first round of Community Review for the DIP in mid-January.
  • Light Weight DRuntime (LWDR) – Dylan Graham had to withdraw from the SAOC event after Milestone 2. However, his LWDR is a passion project that existed prior to SAOC and will still be there after the event ends. He intends to pick up the project again when he is able. We wish him the best and look forward to his future work.
  • Improve DUB: solve dependency hell – Ahmet Sait Koçak picked this project from the community-maintained DLang Project Idea repository. The SAOC judges had concerns about the proposed solution, so before accepting it for SAOC 2021, we discussed the project at the D Language Foundation’s monthly meeting in August. The final decision was to accept the project, but that Ahmet should explore a specific alternative and only attempt his proposed solution if that was not viable. The alternative proved a dead end, so he moved forward on his initial proposal. He was able to make progress until he encountered issues which will likely require work beyond the scope of the project to resolve. As such, he will be unable to complete the event. Future work on solving the DUB dependency hell problem may well need to take a different approach.

DConf Online 2021 Q & A videos

To date as I write, I have published six of the eight Q & A videos that I cut and trimmed down from the Day One and Day Two livestreams. I’ll have the remaining two published, along with the ‘Ask Us Anything!’ session with Walter, Atila, and Razvan, before the middle of January. All of the Q & A videos are available on the DConf Online 2021 Q & A playlist and links are available in the description of each talk at dconf.org. The AUA will be listed on the DConf Online 2021 playlist and linked from its description in the DConf Online 2021 schedule.

On a related note, we’re all itching to get the real-world DConf going again. We’re currently evaluating the possibility of doing so later this year and what it will look like if it happens. Stay tuned.

Onward and upward!

We’ve got a number of things going on for 2022. Some examples: I’ll be publishing a tutorial series on our YouTube channel; we’ll finally publish a new vision document; we’ll be taking the first steps toward bringing the services in our ecosystem under one roof with multiple admins; we’ll either give Bugzilla an overhaul or port our issues to GitHub; we’ll finally have an implementation of the named arguments DIP; and more.

We are always in need of contributors. There are several ways to contribute:

  • If you’re working on your own D project, please contact me to write about it on this blog. Or write about it on your own blog. Or tweet about it. Let the world know what you’re doing! D exists and people are using it, so we need to be shouting out loud so that more people know about it.
  • If you find an issue, please report it. If there’s an issue you can solve, please submit a PR. If you’re interested in solving multiple issues, please contact Razvan Nitu about joining one of his strike teams.
  • If you don’t have time to solve issues, please consider supporting us financially by posting a bounty on any issues you care about, or donating to one of our funds. Or maybe support us by buying swag at the DLang Swag Emporium using the link in the sidebar so that we get a referral bonus on top of royalties. Or perhaps select the D Language Foundation as your preferred charity at smile.amazon.com so that we get a small percentage of your purchase amount when you shop there. (The D Language Foundation is only available as an option through Amazon’s .com domain.)
  • One of the most impactful ways you can contribute is to help newcomers to the D programming language. Hang out on the D Community Discord server or in the D Forums and employ the knowledge you’ve gained about D in helping others solve their problems. Help us in continuing to grow one of the most helpful communities on the internet.

Together, we can make 2022 a great year for our favorite programming language.

Happy New Year!

DLang News September/October 2021: D 2.098.0, OpenBSD, SAOC, DConf Online Swag

Digital Mars D logo

Version 2.098.0 of the D programming language is now available in the form of DMD 2.098.0 (the reference D compiler) and LDC 1.28.0 (the LLVM-based D compiler), D has come to OpenBSD, cool things are happening thanks to the Symmetry Autumn of Code, and DConf Online 2021 t-shirts are available for purchase.

Read on for the deets.

DMD 2.098.0

This release comes with 17 major changes and 160 fixed Bugzilla issues from 62 contributors across the core repositories. The number of fixed issues may well be a record high. The 2.097.0 release had 144, and the 2.094.0 release had 119, but a cursory look at several other major releases shows numbers ranging from the high 40s to under 100, with counts in the 50s showing up frequently. This is the sort of trend we were hoping to see when Razvan Nitu came on board as our Pull Request and Issue Manager, and we couldn’t be more pleased.

There are two items of note that I’d like to point out from the new release, and then I have a little more to say about the work Razvan is doing.

ImportC

The ImportC compiler is a major enhancement to D that allows the D compiler to directly compile C source code. Walter has been working on it for a few months now, and this is the first release in which it’s available. ImportC enables the compiler to inline C function calls and even evaluate them at compile time via CTFE. ImportC targets C11 and does not currently handle preprocessor directives, so any C source you do intend to compile must first be run through a preprocessor. It’s not yet complete, but if you have a use case for it, any help in finding and reporting ImportC bugs is welcome. Contributions to fix said bugs doubly so!

Fork-based garbage collector

This release also includes an optional concurrent garbage collector for Posix systems. This is cool in and of itself, but more so because the project came to fruition thanks to the Symmetry Autumn of Code. It was originally developed for D1 by Leandro Lucarella but was never included in an official release (using alternative GCs back then required more than just a simple command-line switch). In 2018, for the inaugural edition of SAOC, Francesco Mecca undertook to port the GC to D2. This resulted in a pull request to DRuntime that was ultimately merged in time for this release by Rainer Schuetze.

To use the new GC, provide the DRuntime option --DRT-gcopt=fork:1 on the command-line of any program compiled against DRuntime 2.098.0+ (this is not a compiler option, but an option to any program linked with DRuntime). It can also be configured programmatically via:

extern(C) __gshared string[] rt_options = [ "gcopt=fork:1" ];

See the D documentation for more GC configuration options.

Shrinking the pull-request queues

Razvan has been managing pull requests across several of our repositories, but he’s been laser-focused on reducing the number of PRs in the phobos and druntime repositories, with dmd his next target. This isn’t just about lowering the PR count. He’s been reviving old PRs with the original author where he can (he tells me he was surprised how many PR authors were responsive, even after no activity on a PR for a few years) and has tried to rebase and resolve those where he can’t. Here are some statistics he’s gathered on PR activity so far this year across the phobos, druntime, and dmd repositories:

  • phobos: 568 PRs created, 650 PRs closed
  • druntime: 283 PRs created, 311 PRs closed
  • dmd: 1140 PRs created, 1126 closed

At the time he sent me the stats on October 29th, the number of open PRs in phobos had gone down from 160 to 77 and druntime from 130 to 96. The number of open PRs in dmd has remained fairly constant at around 230.

We want to thank Razvan for all the work he is doing, Symmetry Investments for sponsoring his position, the volunteer members of the “strike teams” Razvan has assembled to squash as many bugs as possible, and every contributor who has donated and continues to donate their time and effort to improving our favorite programming language.

LDC 1.28.0

The latest release of LDC implements D 2.098.0 (D frontend, DRuntime, and Phobos) and is compatible with LLVM 6.0 – 12.0.

A major item in this release is that LDC now supports dynamic casts across binary boundaries. DLL support has long been a weak point in D, often requiring the programmer to resort to extern(C) functions that return handles (pointers, references) to D objects. Martin Kinkelin has worked to improve the situation in LDC, motivated primarily by the desire to provide the standard library and runtime as a DLL on Windows.

Thanks to Martin and all the LDC contributors for the work they do to keep LDC releases in sync with those of DMD. If you benefit from their efforts, please consider sponsoring Martin (and LDC by extension) on GitHub!

D on OpenBSD

The D ecosystem grows primarily because of the efforts of volunteers who step forward to fill in the blanks. New D projects pop up all the time, but it’s pretty rare to hear that someone has brought D to a new platform. Brian Callahan has done just that.

Brian has been on a mission to bring D to OpenBSD. In August of this year, he popped into the D forums with an announcement that GDC, the GCC-based D compiler maintained by Iain Buclaw, was now available in the OpenBSD ports tree as part of GCC 11. In early October, he let us know that DMD was coming to the platform. Then in late October, he had the same news about LDC. Instructions for installing DMD on OpenBSD are on the download page (and can be extrapolated to LDC and GDC).

We are grateful to Brian for the work he has done to make this happen. We’re looking forward to his upcoming DConf Online 2021 talk, Life Outside the Big 4: The Adventure of D on OpenBSD:

The journey of D from pie-in-the-sky to a package officially offered in the OpenBSD package repository serves as a model story for other platforms who want to offer D to their userbase. We will walk through the many interconnected parts required to get a D package on OpenBSD, what the future is like for D outside the Big 4, how you can get started with D on your platform, and how those of us who enjoy life outside the Big 4 can be a positive force for D and the D community.

SAOC News

The SAOC 2021 progress bar is past the 25% mark. The first milestone wrapped up on October 15, and the participants have been posting weekly progress reports in the General Forum. It’s always interesting to read about the challenges they encounter and their solutions. But the latest SAOC isn’t the only edition about which there is news to report.

I’ve written above about the SAOC 2018 forking GC project that has found its way into the latest release of DRuntime. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am that another SAOC project has come into its own.

For SAOC 2020, Adela Vais set out to implement a D backend for the venerable Bison parser generator. Not only did Adela successfully complete SAOC, she saw her project through to its ultimate goal. The D backend was officially released as part of Bison 3.81 in September.

We want to offer Adela our congratulations and a huge round of applause for a job well done! Getting a project of this scope accepted into a GNU codebase is no mean feat.

DConf Online 2021 T-Shirts

DConf Online 2021 is less than a month away. The D Language Foundation will be providing DConf Online 2021 swag to the DConf speakers and prizes to viewers asking questions in the post-talk live stream Q & A sessions. The cost of the items and their shipping are the only DConf Online expenses, and they’re covered by the D Language Foundation General Fund.

Direct donations to the General Fund and our more targeted funds are always appreciated, but you can also help support the D programming language and DConf Online by purchasing a DConf Online 2021 T-Shirt or other D swag in the DLang Swag Emporium. All proceeds go straight into the General Fund. You get some swag along with our gratitude, and we get a couple of bucks. That’s a pretty good deal!

Looking Forward

As we near the end of 2021, we are looking forward to 2022 and beyond. The D programming language, its ecosystem, and its community have come a long way from the gaggle of curious coders who first took an interest in a one-man project by the guy who had created the game Empire and the Zortech C++ compiler.

The primary means of contributing to the core D projects went from emailing patches to Walter, to posting patches on Bugzilla, to committing to a Subversion repository, to submitting pull requests on GitHub. The web site went from being a few basic HTML pages of the D spec on digitalmars.com maintained only by Walter, to a simple HTML site designed by a community member under the dlang.org domain, to the more complex collection of pages and scripts that today is maintained in Ddoc by multiple contributors. The ecosystem has gone from random libraries and tools hosted by individuals on myriad services, to centralized hosting at dsource.org, to the package repository at code.dlang.org.

These are just some examples of major changes over the years, each in response to growth: as the community grew in size, some of the processes and systems began to burst at the seams. To continue to grow, something had to change. Such improvements have nearly always been the result of community action: discussion and debate in the forums eventually would lead to a champion stepping forward to make it happen. Community action has been the driving force of D since Walter first announced the “D alpha compiler” in late 2001. That’s still true today. We have a handful of paid positions, but we are still primarily driven by volunteers.

The see-a-problem-and-fix-it philosophy that carried D to where we are today has served us well, and we hope it will continue to do so into the future. But that alone is no longer enough. We are bursting at the seams again, and have been for some time. In the monthly foundation meetings, we’ve been discussing specific issues, both low level and high, and how to solve them. But there’s one thing that’s been missing from the equation: organization.

Razvan Nitu’s position as Pull Request & Issue Manager grew out of an email discussion, prompted by Laeeth Isharc, and was a year in the making. We are grateful for every volunteer who has and continues to make themselves available to review pull requests. Razvan is here not to replace them, but to complement them. They can continue as they have done. What Razvan brings to the mix is organization. He’s there to make sure fewer issues and PRs fall through the cracks, to ensure that as many issues as possible that can be resolved are resolved.

In November, the D Language Foundation and a couple of contributors are meeting with a community member who has graciously volunteered his time and expertise to advise us on how to bring the disparate servers in the D community under Foundation management and multiple admins. The end goals are to eliminate the financial burden on the volunteers who maintain these services and, hopefully, reduce the response time when it comes to solving server-related issues or making changes. In other words, organization.

I’m in the middle of revising the Vision Document that we put together over the summer. I’m not just editing it, though. I’m expanding it. My vision of the vision document has evolved since we first discussed a “goal-oriented task list” in our June meeting. I said at the time that I didn’t “know what the initial version of the final list will look like”. I feel that what we came up with falls short of meeting the need it was intended to fill. Now, I’m pretty sure of what it needs to look like. At the moment, I’m swamped in preparations for DConf Online 2021, so I’ve put the document on the backburner. I plan to pick it up again in early December and present my revisions at the last foundation meeting of the year for approval. If all goes well, it should be published on dlang.org in January. This will be a living document, updated to reflect current priorities as time goes by.

Mathias Lang is working on a proposal to bring organization into even more of our processes. It’s a modified version of the governance proposal he brought to the September foundation meeting, the aim of which is to formalize a core team to oversee the day-to-day guidance and management of the D ecosystem. I hope that this will take what already happens in our monthly meetings to the next level. I see this as a means to establish a framework for creating workgroups that can oversee specific tasks and projects, bringing more opportunities for follow-up and follow-through. It should also help provide guidance and establish priorities (e.g., via revisions to the vision document) so that independent contributors can direct their efforts not just to the issues they care about, but those that are seen as a priority by the core team. (I want to emphasize that this is my personal view. Mathias has yet to complete the proposal. But my view is informed by what we discussed in the September meeting.)

With these and future steps aimed at better organizing our community, we intend to level up our ecosystem: motivate library development, improve the onboarding experience, increase retention, make it easier to contribute, and generally resolve the long-standing issues that tarnish the experience of using the best programming language we know. We ask our current volunteers to keep volunteering, and those who aren’t yet doing so to keep an eye out for the right opportunity to pitch in. Together, we can get to where we all want to go.

Bugzilla Reward System

Digital Mars D logo

The Dlang bot has been updated to track Bugzilla issues
that have been fixed. It went live for testing on the 2nd of July. Each GitHub user who fixes a bug via a merged pull request is awarded a number of points depending on the severity of the issue. The current results can always be seen on the contributor stats page. This blog post covers all of the details regarding the implementation, rules, and prizes of the reward system.

Raison d’être

I want to start by saying that the motivation of this system is not to start a fierce competition between contributors to fix as many issues as possible. The primary reasons: we see this as a means for the D Language Foundation to reward committed contributors and to channel their efforts towards more important bugs. If, as a side effect, the system motivates people to fix more bugs, that’s great! We won’t complain.

There are some negative side effects that are possible with any sort of gamification system, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for them. We think we have one of the best online communities out there. Our members are generally friendly and helpful, and we don’t want to do anything that causes tension or proves negatively disruptive. We think this will be a fun way to reward our contributors, but we will pull the plug if it proves otherwise.

Scoring system

The scoring is designed to reward contributors based on the importance of the issues they fix, rather than the total number fixed. As such, issues are awarded points based on severity:

  • enhancement: 10
  • trivial: 10
  • minor: 15
  • normal: 20
  • major: 50
  • critical/blocker: 75
  • regression: 100

Of course, the severity of an issue does not necessarily reflect the complexity of the solution. There might be regressions that are trivial to solve, and enhancements that require an extremely complicated fix. The message that we are trying to send is that complexity is secondary to need. That is why regressions are given top priority and critical/blocker/major issues aren’t far behind.

Rules

The following rules will guide how points are awarded from the initial launch of the reward system. They are not set in stone and are open to revision over time.

Rule #1: The severity of an issue will be decided by the reviewers of a proposed patch.

Severity levels are not always accurately set when issues are first reported and may not have been updated since. The reviewer of a pull request that closes a Bugzilla issue will evaluate the issue’s severity level and may change it if he or she determines it is inaccurate. I will moderate any disagreements that may arise about severity levels.

Rule #2: A PR fixing a bug may not be merged by the same person that proposed the patch.

This is already an unwritten rule that applies to the DLang repositories, so it should not surprise anyone.

Rule #3: Anyone who adopts an orphaned PR that fixes a bug may be awarded its associated points.

To avoid any authorship conflicts, it is best if the adopter contacts the original author to ask if it is okay to adopt the PR. Rule #3 will apply if there is no response or if the response is affirmative. Otherwise, no points will be awarded.

Rule #4: Only one person may receive points per fixed issue.

This rule is specifically designed for reverted PRs. Imagine that a PR that presumably fixes an issue is merged and the author gets points for it. Later on, it is decided that the fix is incorrect and the PR is reverted. If someone else proposes the correct fix, the points will be subtracted from the original contributor and awarded to the new author. Hopefully, this will motivate the original contributor to propose the correct fix after the reversion.

Rule #5: Incomplete fixes still get points.

A Bugzilla report usually includes a snippet of code that reproduces the issue. A frequent pattern is that the bug is correctly fixed for the provided snippet, then someone comes up with a slightly modified example that does not work and reopens the issue. Since the original fix was correct, but not complete, the procedure here is that the original issue should be left closed and a new one should be opened. The original author keeps the points awarded for the original issue.

Implementation

Since most of you are die-hard geeks and are eagerly awaiting the code, here’s the database implementation hosted on the dlang-bot, and here’s the web page implementation. You will notice that the web page is extremely minimal. That is because I am a total n00b when it comes to web programming, so if anyone has the skills and the time to make a cooler web page, feel free to make a PR :D.

In short, for each of the issues that are fixed, the database stores the Bugzilla issue number, the GitHub ID of the person who fixed it, the date when the fix was merged, and the severity of the issue. Every time the leaderboard page is accessed, a query is issued to the database to compute the total points for all of the contributors and sort them in descending order. Easy peasy.

I would like to thank Vladimir Pantaleev for his continued support and assistance throughout the period that I implemented the system.

Prizes

As Mike briefly described in this forum post, we are going to have quarterly competitions. The quarterly prizes will vary. At the end of the year, the person who has acquired the most points will be awarded a bigger prize.

For the inaugural competition, which will officially start on the 20th of September 2021 and will last until the start of DConf Online (the 20th of November), the prizes will be:

  • First Place: a $300 Amazon eGift Card
  • Second Place: a $200 Amazon eGift Card
  • Third Place: a $100 Amazon eGift Card

The next set of prizes will be announced at DConf Online, so stay tuned!

That’s all folks!

If there are any questions or suggestions regarding any aspect of the bugfix reward system, please contact me at razvan.nitu1305@gmail.com. Also, feel free to directly propose changes to the existing infrastructure.

Happy coding everyone!

SAOC 2021 Projects

Digital Mars D logo

The applications have been reviewed, the results decided, and the applicants notified. Five coders will be participating in the 2021 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code, one of whom will be the first to take part in SAOC two times.

Following is a brief introduction to each participant and an equally brief summary of their projects. The project planning phase officially kicks off on September 1st, so any details I could provide from their applications would likely change by the time they finalize their initial milestones with their mentors. If you’re eager for more detail, please hold out a little while longer. The participants will start posting updates in the forums once their projects are underway. Their first updates should include more information.

Rethinking the default class hierarchy

If you followed SAOC 2020, you may recall that Robert Aron was a fourth-year student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest who worked on implementing D client libraries for the Google APIs, along with a tool to generate client libraries for said APIs (all of which can be found in his GitHub repositories). He also was a recipient of the final SAOC payment (one of two last year, where usually we have only one) and is owed a free trip to a future real-world DConf.

Robert is now working toward an MSc in Security of Complex Networks at the same university, and he’s back with us for SAOC 2021. His project this time around is a DIP for and implementation of the ProtoObject concept that Eduard Staniloiu described in his DConf 2019 talk. This will set a ProtoObject class as the root class of D’s object hierarchy and the ancestor of the existing Object class. It will allow users to opt-in to features currently provided by default through Object, such as the inclusion of a monitor to support synchronization.

Once again, Robert will be working with Eduard Staniloiu and Razvan Nitu as his mentors.

Welcome back, Robert!

Replace DRuntime hooks with templates

Teodor Dutu is also at university in Bucharest working on a master’s degree in Advanced Cybersecurity. He has experience in C and Java, and it’s the low-level experience he gained working on projects like a file system, a kernel module, and an asynchronous HTTP server that he wants to apply toward improving the D ecosystem. The D language grabbed his interest when he participated in Razvan and Edi’s D Summer School, and he is eager to help out where he can.

To that end, Teodor is entering SAOC to work on a change to DRuntime. Currently, certain operations in user code are rewritten to call functions in the runtime known as runtime hooks (if you’ve ever seen a linker error mentioning something like _d_newArrayT or a symbol with a similar name, that was a runtime hook). There are some significant downsides to this approach, such as code bloat (the entire DRuntime library is linked in when linking statically), negative performance impact (due to the use of TypeInfo to pass runtime information to the hooks), and code that’s hard to maintain (the hooks are inserted at the IR level, a component of the compiler that’s difficult to understand).

Teodor’s plan is to replace each of the runtime hooks with templates. Dan Printzell already did some work on this, and Teodor will be following in his footsteps intending to take it all the way.

Eduard Staniloiu and Razvan Nitu will be Teodor’s mentors.

Implement support for D in LLVM Debugger (LLDB)

Luís Ferreira has extensive experience with C, C++, and D. He has contributed to DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos, and has a WIP implementation of DIP 1029 (Add throw as a Function Attribute) underway.

One of the projects Luís has been working on in his free time is a rewrite of DRuntime’s demangler to avoid exceptions, taken on because of his interest in mangling and demangling. He also has an interest in LLVM. The combination sparked the idea for his SAOC project. His rough goals for the project are to add support to LLDB for demangling D symbols, recognizing D-specific data structures, and parsing D expressions.

Mathias Lang has taken on the role of mentor for this project.

Light Weight DRuntime (LWDR)

Dylan Graham made waves on this blog when he wrote about the custom gearbox controller he built, using D for its firmware. That project led him to a new one: D needs a runtime that is suitable for embedded, Internet of Things, and real-time operating systems. That’s when he started work on LWDR.

You can see from that link that LWDR is not a port of DRuntime, but “a completely new implementation for low-resource environments”, and you’ll find a list of features that are currently supported. For SAOC, Dylan will be working on expanding feature support, shoring up what’s already there and adding new features along the way.

Dylan is a university student in Australia, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Computer Science through Monash University. He’s been programming since he was 11 years old, starting with C on the Arduino Uno and BASIC on the Maximite. His courses have exposed him to several other languages, and he has shown he’s a good hand with D.

His mentor for SAOC 2021 is Adam D. Ruppe.

Improve DUB: solve dependency hell

Ahmet Sait Koçak is a Computer Engineering student from Turkey. He has a strong background in C#, but considers D his second-most comfortable language. Some might be familiar with his work maintaining bindbc-harfbuzz.

For his SAOC project, he made use of our Projects repository and settled on the idea of solving the “dependency hell” problem that can arise when using DUB. Essentially, if library A depends on libraries B and C, which in turn depend on two different versions of library D, dub will error out without any effort to resolve the version conflict.

In reviewing the application, the judges identified some issues with the project as proposed, but it was still accepted with the understanding that Ahmet may need to take a different approach. His project subsequently gained the distinction of being the first SAOC project application discussed in a D Language Foundation meeting. The goal was to determine if there might be another way.

Ahmet’s mentor is Max Haughton, who was present for the meeting. He will be working with Ahmet to investigate the solution arrived at in the meeting and, if that proves infeasible, to move forward with the initial idea. Either way, you’ll hear the details from Ahmet in his weekly forum updates.

Onward!

The SAOC judges (Átila Neves, Robert Schadek, and John Colvin) were impressed with the quality of the applications this year and are eager to see how the projects turn out. Please keep an eye out for the weekly updates that should start arriving in the forums around September 22nd, a week after Milestone 1 begins. This will help you keep abreast of the progress of each project and also provide an opportunity for suggestions that might help our SAOC 2021 coders along their paths.

Milestone 1 kicks off on September 15th, and Milestone 4 will end on January 15th. The D Language Foundation and our sponsors, Symmetry Investments, wish these five coders well in all they do over those four months. Their success is the D community’s success, so we hope everyone will join us in ensuring they have all the support and help they need to get through their four milestones and see this thing through to the end.

D News Roundup

Version 2.097.0 of DMD, the D programming language reference compiler, was released on June 5th in the middle of new GDC and LDC release announcements, while preparations for two major D community events were underway: the Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021 and DConf Online 2021. We’ll cover it all in this post, with a focus first on the events.

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

Symmetry Investments logo

As I write, Symmetry Investments employs in the neighborhood of 180 full-time workers and manages over US$8 billion of capital, and they’re always on the lookout for more employees, including programmers to work with D and other languages. They sponsored DConf 2019 in London and have sponsored the annual Symmetry Autumn of Code since 2018, in which a handful of programmers are paid to work for four months on projects of benefit to the D ecosystem.

This year marks the fourth annual SAoC, and we are now accepting applications. Participants will plan four milestones for projects that benefit the D ecosystem and will be expected to work at least 20 hours per week on each milestone. Each participant will be rewarded US$1000 for the successful completion of each of the first three milestones. At the end of the final milestone, the SAoC committee will review the overall progress of each of the remaining participants. One will be rewarded with a final $US1000 payment and a free pass to the next real-world DConf, with reimbursement for travel and lodging. In last year’s event, a second participant was also awarded a fourth US$1000 payment.

Participation in SAoC has led to jobs for some lucky coders and has generally been a valuable learning experience for those who have completed it. Students currently enrolled in graduate or postgraduate university programs will be given priority, but applications are open to all. The application deadline is August 18th. Project ideas can be found in the D community’s projects repository at GitHub. See the Symmetry Autumn of Code page here at the D Blog for all the details on how to apply as a participant or as a mentor.

DConf Online 2021

For the second consecutive year, we were unable to hold a real-world DConf. Last year we launched the first annual DConf Online. And when I say annual, I mean annual! We’re doing it again this year and will continue to do it going forward even after the real-world DConfs are back on.

DConf Online 2021 will take place November 20 and 21 on the D Language Foundation’s YouTube channel. Once again, we’re looking for pre-recorded talks, livestream panels, and livecoding sessions. If you’d like to propose something in one of those categories, the application deadline is September 5. Please visit the DConf Online 2021 homepage for all the details.

And if you haven’t seen them yet, the DConf Online 2020 and DConf Online 2020 Q & A playlists are available on the same channel. You can also find a full list of talks and all the links (talk videos, slides, and Q & A videos) on the DConf Online 2020 homepage.

New compiler releases

D 2.097.0 is live in the latest release of DMD and the beta release of LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler. The new version of GDC also came into the world as part of GCC 11.1 at the end of April.

DMD 2.097.0

Digital Mars D logo

This version of DMD comes with 29 major changes and 144(!) fixed Bugzilla issues courtesy of 54 contributors. Changes include a few deprecations and several improvements to the standard library. Two things stand out:

  • while(auto n = expression) has been on a few wishlists for a while. Now it’s a reality. The same syntax that was already possible with if statements is considered idiomatic in certain circumstances (such as when checking if an item exists in an associative array). Expect the while condition assignment to start popping up in open-source D projects soon.
  • std.sumtype is another wishlist item that is a wish no more. The new SumType is a replacement for std.variant.Algebraic. It’s a discriminated union that makes good use of Design by Introspection with a nice match syntax for those looking for that sort of thing. It’s been quite a while since the last time a new module was added to the D standard library. Many thanks to Paul Backus for putting in the effort to see it through, and a very big Congratulations!

LDC 1.27.0-beta1

LDC logo

On the same day the new DMD was released, the first beta of LDC 1.27.0, which also supports D 2.097.0, was announced in the D forums.

On top of 2.097.0 support, this version of LDC provides greatly improved DLL support on Windows. The prebuilt Windows packages ship with DRuntime and Phobos DLLs. This is big news for D developers on Windows. We’ve long had issues with D DLLs that have prevented heavy use outside of simple interfaces (with APIs exported as extern(C) being the most reliable).

There are some limitations to be aware of, such as the inability to directly access TLS variables across DLL boundaries (though it’s fine with accessor functions). Please see the release page for the details.

Thanks to Martin Kinkelin and all the LDC maintainers and contributors for their continued work on LDC. They aren’t getting paid for this. If you are a happy LDC user or just like the idea of the project, you can support their work by sponsoring Martin Kinkelin on GitHub.

GDC 11.1

In the GCC world, Iain Buclaw continues to make strides on the GDC compiler.

GDC 11.1 still uses the old C++ version of the D frontend, which feature-wise is mostly (see below) at D 2.076.1. There were significant issues in upstream DMD that prevented Iain from making the switch to the D version of the frontend in time to make the release window. He is currently aiming to make the switch in time for GDC 12. As a consolation, this release has support for three BSDs, Mac OS X, and MinGW!

Despite the older frontend, Iain has backported several fixes and optimizations, and even a few features, so it isn’t your grandfather’s D 2.076.1 that GDC supports. For example, the new bottom type that recently made its way through the D Improvement Proposal review process has found its way into this GDC release. See the forum announcement for details of all the new D goodness in GDC 11.1 and Please consider sponsoring his work on GitHub.

One-off donations

If you aren’t up for sponsoring Martin or Iain but would still like to support them financially, you can make one-time donations through the D Language Foundation. You can send money to the D General Fund, the D Open Collective, or to our PayPal account. Whichever method you choose, please be sure to leave a note that the donation is intended for LDC, GDC, or any D project you would like to support. We’ll make sure the appropriate person receives the money.

Other options for supporting the D programming language: visit the D Language Foundation donation page and donate to one of our funds, head to the DLang Swag Emporium and purchase any items that catch your eye (the D Rocket stuff rocks, and DConf Online 2021 swag will be available shortly), or consider using smile.amazon.com and selecting the D Language Foundation as your charity the next time you shop at Amazon.com (we are only available through the .com domain; browser extensions like SmartAmazonSmile for Firefox and AmazonSmileRedirect for Chrome make it easy to do).

Thanks to everyone who has, will, or continues to support the D programming language, either through donations of time or money. We’ve gotten where we are through community effort, and community effort will keep pushing us forward. D rocks!

Symmetry Investments and the D Language Foundation are Hiring

Digital Mars D logo

The D Language Foundation is hiring! Thanks to generous funding from Symmetry Investments, we are looking to fill two (mostly) non-programming positions geared toward improving the D ecosystem. Symmetry is also offering a bounty for a specific improvement to DUB, the D build tool and package manager. And on top of all of that, they are hiring D programmers.

D Pull Request/Issue Manager

A lot of good work goes into the D Programming Language GitHub repositories. Unfortunately, some of that good work sometimes gets left behind. A similar story can be told for our Bugzilla database, where some issues are fixed almost as soon as they’re reported and others fall victim to a lack of attention. Efforts have been made in the past to tidy things up, but without someone in a position to permanently keep at it, it’s a task that is never complete.

The D Language Foundation is looking for one or two motivated individuals to take on that permanent position, get the work done, and keep things running smoothly. Symmetry Investements is generously funding this role with $50,000 per year for one person, or $25,000 per year for each of two.

The ideal candidate is someone who:

  • is familiar with git, GitHub, and Bugzilla;
  • is familiar enough with D to be able to review simple pull requests;
  • is able to recognize when more specialized reviews are required and
  • is able to proofread English text (for reviewing documentation and web site pull requests).

Examples of the role’s responsibilities include:

  • ensuring all pull requests follow procedure;
  • reviewing simple pull requests;
  • finding appropriate reviewers for more complex pull requests;
  • ensuring that pull requests are reviewed in a timely manner;
  • reviving stale pull requests;
  • coordinating between pull request submitters and reviewers to prevent pull requests from going stale;
  • closing pull requests that are no longer valid;
  • identifying Bugzilla issues that are duplicates or invalid;
  • identifying Bugzilla issues that are candidates for bounties;
  • publicizing Bugzilla issues in need of a champion and
  • other related tasks.

We are hoping to hire from within the D community, though we will accept queries from anyone. If you are interested in taking on the role, please send your resume to social@dlang.org. You should also indicate if you are willing to do the job full time (just you) or part time (share the responsibilities with someone else).

Community Relations Assistant

I’ve been working with the D Language Foundation for the past three years. Much of what I do falls loosely in the category of Community Relations. These days, I’m in need of an assistant. Symmetry Investments is providing $600 per month for the role.

The job will involve a number of different activities as the need arises, such as:

  • seeking out guest authors and projects to highlight for the D Blog;
  • monitoring our social media accounts;
  • sending out messages from the D Language Foundation (such as thank you notes to new donors);
  • assisting with maintenance of pages at dlang.org and dconf.org;
  • assisting with the organization of events like DConf and SAOC and
  • any odd jobs that pop up now and again.

If you have good communication skills, an optimistic disposition, and enthusiasm for the D Programming Language, I’d like to talk to you. I don’t need a resume. Instead, please send an email to social@dlang.org explaining why you’re the right person for the job.

DUB Bounty

Symmetry Investments logoDUB has become a critical component in the D ecosystem. A significant number of projects depend on it and we need it to be able to meet a wide range of project needs. To that end, there are certainly improvements to be made. One such is in how DUB determines which of a project’s source files are in need of recompilation. Currently, DUB follows in the tradition of the venerable make and uses timestamp comparisons to make that determination.

A new generation of version control and build tools (git, buck, bazel, scons, waf, plz, and more) rely on file checksums to assess the need for action. This is a much more robust approach because it detects actual changes in file content. Timestamps can change in any number of irrelevant ways. Robustness is important if one is to depend on a build working properly even when files are moved, copied, and shared across people, machines, and teams. As hashes are fast to compute on modern hardware, the impact on speed is very low.

Symmetry Investments is offering a $2,000 bounty to the programmer who either converts DUB’s use of timestamp-dependent builds to use SHA-1 hashing throughout, or implements it as a global option to preserve the current behavior.

For inspiration, see this clip from Linus Torvald’s Google talk, and the article Build-Systems Should Use Hashes Over Timestamps. Note that shasum $(git ls-files) in Phobos takes 0.05 seconds on a warm SSD drive in a desktop machine.

Anyone interested in taking on this bounty should contact social@dlang.org beforehand. Anyone interested in contributing to the bounty amount can do so via the bounty card Support for Hash-Based Recompilation in DUB at our Task Bounties page.

SAOC 2020 and Other News

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2020

Symmetry Investments logo

The 3rd annual Symmetry Autumn of Code (SAoC) is on!

From now until August 16th, we’re accepting applications from motivated coders interested in getting paid to improve the D ecosystem. The SAoC committee will review all submissions and, based on the quality of the applications received, select a number of applicants to complete four milestones from September 15th to January 15th. Each participant will receive $1000 for the successful completion of each of the first three milestones, and one of them will receive an additional $1000 and a free trip (reimbursement for transportation and accommodation, and free registration) to the next real-world DConf (given the ongoing pandemic, we can’t yet be sure when that will be).

Anyone interested in programming D is welcome to apply, but preference will be given to those who can provide proof of enrollment in undergraduate or postgraduate university programs. For details on how to apply, see the SAoC 2020 page here at the D Blog.

The participants will need mentors, so we invite experienced D programmers interested in lending a hand to get in touch and to keep an eye out in the forums for any SAoC applicants in search of a mentor. As with the previous edition of SAoC, all mentors whose mentee completes the event will be guaranteed a one-time payment of $500 after the final milestone (mentors of unsuccessful mentees may still be eligible for the payment at the discretion of the SAoC committee). Potential mentors can follow the same link for details on their responsibilities and how to make themselves available.

We’re also looking for community input on potential SAoC projects. If there’s any work you’re aware of that needs doing in the D ecosystem and which may keep a lone coder occupied for 20 hours per week over four months, please let us know! Once again, details on how submit your suggestions and what sort of information we’re looking for can be found on the SAoC 2020 page.

Our SAoC 2019 selectee, Roberto Rosmaninho, was all set to attend DConf 2020 and we were all looking forward to meeting him. He’ll still be eligible to claim his free DConf trip at the next available opportunity.

SAoC would not be possible without the generosity of Symmetry Investments. A big thanks to them for once again funding this event and for the other ways, both financial and otherwise, they contribute back to the D programming language community.

Finances

Thanks to everyone who has shopped in the DLang Swag Emporium! To date, the D Language Foundation has received over $177 in royalties and referral fees. Thanks are also in order to those who have supported the foundation through smile.amazon.com. Your purchases have brought over $288 into the General Fund. Amazon Smile is perhaps the easiest way to support D financially if you shop through Amazon’s .com domain (the D Language Foundation is unavailable in other Amazon domains). If you’ve never done so, you can select a charitable foundation (the D Language Foundation, of course) on your first visit to smile.amazon.com. Then, every time you shop through that link, the foundation will receive a small percentage of your total purchase. Check your browser’s extension market for plugins that convert every amazon.com link to a smile.amazon.com link!

On the Task Bounties front, we may have closed out a big bounty for bringing D to iOS and iPadOS, but there are still several other bounties waiting to be claimed. The latest, currently at $220, is a bounty to improve DLL support on Windows by closing two related Bugzilla issues; 50% of the total bounty will be paid for the successful closure (merged PR and DMD release) of each issue. We welcome anyone interested in fixing these issues to either up the bounty or roll up their sleeves and start working toward claiming it. If you’d like to contribute to multiple bounties with a single credit card payment, or seed one or more new bounties with a specific amount, visit the Task Bounty Catch-All and follow the instructions there.

Finally, the question was recently raised in the forums about how to view the D Language Foundation’s finances. Because the foundation is a 501(3)(c) non-profit public charity, the Form 990 that the organization is required to submit to the IRS every year is publicly available. There are different ways you can obtain the documents for multiple years, such as searching online databases or contacting the IRS directly. Several websites, such as grantspace.org, provide details on how to do so. The Form 990 does not break down specific expenditures or sources of income except for special circumstances (like scholarship payments). With Andrei’s help, I’m currently working on gathering up more information on the past five years of the foundation’s finances so that we can put up an overview page at dlang.org. It won’t be at line-item detail, but we hope to provide a little more detail than the Form 990. I can’t provide a timeline on when it will be available (I don’t consider it a high priority task, so I’m working on it sporadically), but expect it sometime in the next few months.

DConf Online?

Rumor has it that online conferences are actually a thing. Voices in the wind speak of the potential for an annual event related to D. I don’t usually listen to voices I hear in the wind, but this time I’m intrigued…

D 2.091.0 Released

Digital Mars D logoThe latest release of DMD, the D reference compiler, ships with 18 major changes and 66 bugfixes from 55 contributors. This release contains, among other goodies, improvements to the Windows experience and enhancements to C and C++ interoperability. As fate would have it, the initial release announcement came in the aftermath of some unfortunate news regarding DConf 2020.

DMD on Windows

Over the years, some D users have remarked that the development of D is Linux-centric, that Windows is the black sheep or red-headed stepchild of D platforms. For anyone familiar with D’s early history, that seems an odd thing to say, given that DMD started out as a Windows-only compiler that could only output 32-bit objects in the OMF format. But it’s also understandable, as anyone not familiar with that history could only see that DMD on Windows lagged behind the Linux releases.

64-bit

One place where the official DMD releases on Windows have continued to differ from the releases on other platforms is the lack of 64-bit binaries in the release packages. Again, there’s a historical reason for this. The default output of the compiler is determined by how it is compiled, e.g., 32-bit versions output 32-bit binaries by default. When Walter first added support to DMD for 64-bit output on Windows, it required giving the back end the ability to generate object files in Microsoft’s version of the COFF format and also requiring users to install the Microsoft Build Tools and Platform SDK for access to the MS linker and system link libraries. This is quite a different experience from other platforms, where you can generally expect a common set of build tools to have been installed via the system package manager on any system set up for C and C++ development.

For a Windows developer who chooses GCC for their C and C++ development (or who does no C or C++ development at all), it’s a big ask to require them to download and install several GBs they might not already have installed and probably will never use for anything else. So D releases on Windows continued to ship with 32-bit binaries and the OPTLINK linker in order to provide a minimum out-of-the-box experience. That was a perfectly fine solution, unless you happened to be someone who really wanted 64-bit output (posts from disgruntled Windows users who didn’t want to install the MS tools can be found sprinkled throughout the forum archives).

Eventually, the LLVM linker (LLD) was added to the DMD Windows release packages, along with system link libraries generated from the MinGW definitions. This allowed users to compile 64-bit output out of the box and, once the kinks were worked out, eliminated the dependency on the MS linker. Yet, the official release packages still did not include a 64-bit version of DMD and still did not support 64-bit output by default.

With DMD 2.091.0, the black sheep has come back into the fold. The official DMD releases on Windows now ship with 64-bit binaries, so those of you masochists out there who cling to Makefiles and custom build scripts can expect the default output be what you expect it to be (for the record, DUB, the build tool and package manager that ships with DMD, has been instructing the compiler to compile 64-bit output by default on 64-bit systems for the past few releases).

Windows gets even more love

There are lots of goodies for Windows in this release. Another biggie is that DMD is now 30-40% faster on Windows. It’s no secret that LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler, generates faster binaries than DMD (for some D users, the general rule of thumb is to develop with DMD for its fast compile times and release with LDC for its faster binaries, though others argue that LDC is plenty fast for development and DMD is fine for production). There have been requests for some time to stop compiling DMD with DMD and start doing it with LDC instead. This release is the first to put that into practice.

There are a number of smaller enhancements to the Windows experience: the install.sh script available on the DMD downloads page that some people prefer now supports POSIX environments on Windows; the system link libraries that ship with the compiler have been upgraded from MinGW  5.0.2 to 7.0.0; LLD has been upgraded to 9.0.0; and there’s plenty more in the changelog.

C++ Header Generation

With just about every major release of DMD, D’s interoperability with C and C++ sees some kind of improvement. This release brings a huge one.

Over the years, some have speculated that it would be excellent if the D compiler could generate headers for C and C++ for D libraries intended to be usable in C or C++ programs. Now that wishful thinking has become a(n experimental) reality. Given a set of extern(C) or extern(C++) functions, DMD can generate header files that contain the appropriate C or C++ declarations. Three compiler switches get the job done:

  • -HC will cause the header to be generated and printed to standard output
  • -HCf=fileName will cause the header to be generated and printed to the specified file
  • -HCd=directoryname will (once it’s implemented) cause the header to be printed to a file in the specified directory

See the changelog for example output.

Other News

While the Corona virus was initially ramping up out of sight from most of the world, plans for DConf 2020 were ramping up online from different locations around the world. Planning began in November, the venue was secured in late December, and the website launched with the announcement in early January.

As news of the virus outbreak spread, the conference organizers grew concerned. Would we be okay in June? In late February, that concern manifested as a discussion of possible contingency plans. Two weeks later, it resulted in the decision to cancel DConf 2020. Thankfully, the D community has been supportive of the decision.

As part of the discussion of contingency plans, the possibility was raised of hosting an online conference. The idea of course came up in the discussion of the cancellation in the forums, and a few people reached out shortly after the initial announcement offering to provide help in setting something up. Walter created a forum thread to discuss the topic for anyone interested.

No one involved with organizing DConf has any experience with hosting an online conference. We’re currently exploring options and looking at what the organizers of other Conferences in the Time of COVID-19 are doing. We want to do it, and we want to do it well. Experience with organizing DConf in the real world has taught us not to jump on any old technology without first having a fallback (ahem, DConf 2018 livestream) and making sure the tech does what we expect it to (ahem, DConf 2019 livestream). So don’t expect a quick announcement. We want to find the right tech that fits our requirements and explore how it works before we move forward with setting dates. But do expect that DConf 2020 Online is looking more and more likely to become a thing.