Monthly Archives: January 2017

Project Highlight: DPaste

DPaste is an online compiler and collaboration tool for the D Programming Language. Type in some D code, click run, and see the results. Code can also be saved so that it can be shared with others. Since it was first announced in the forums back in 2012, it has become a frequently used tool in facilitating online discussions in the D community. But Damian Ziemba, the creator and maintainer of DPaste, didn’t set out with that goal in mind.

Actually it was quite spontaneous and random. I was hanging out on the #D IRC channel at freenode. I was quite amazed at how active this channel was. People were dropping by asking questions, lots of code snippets were floating around. One of the members created an IRC bot that was able to compile code snippets, but it was for his own language that he created with D. Someone else followed and created the same kind of bot, but with the ability to compile code in D, though it didn’t last long as it was run on his own PC. So I wrote my own, purely in D, that was compiling D snippets. It took me maybe 4-5 hours to write both an IRC support lib and the logic itself. Then some server hardening where the bot was running and voila, we had nazbot @ #D, which was able to evaluate statements like ^stmt import std.stdio; writeln("hello world"); and would respond with, "hello world".

Nazbot became popular and people started floating new ideas. That ultimately led Damian to take a CMS he had already written in PHP and repurpose it to use as a frontend for what then became DPaste.

The frontend is written in PHP and uses MySQL for storage. It acts as a web interface (using a Bootstrap HTML template and jQuery) and API provider for 3rd Parties. The backend is responsible for actual compilation and execution. It’s possible to use multiple backends. The frontend is a kind of load-balancer when it comes to choosing a backend. The frontend and the backend may live on different machines.

DPaste is primarily used through the web interface, but it’s also used by dlang.org.

Once dpaste.dzfl.pl was well received, the idea popped up that maybe we could provide runnable examples on the main site. So it was implemented. The next idea, proposed by Andrei Alexandrescu, was to enable runnable examples on all of the Phobos documentation. I got swallowed by real life and couldn’t contribute at the time, but eventually Sebastian Wilzbach took it up and finished the implementation. So today we have interactive examples in the Phobos documentation.

When Damian first started work on DPaste in 2011, the D ecosystem looked a bit different than it does today.

There weren’t as many 3rd party libraries as we have now; there was no DUB, there was no vibe.d, etc. I wish I’d had vibe.d back then. I would have implemented the frontend in D instead of PHP.

What I enjoy the most about D is just how “nice” to the eye the language is (compared to C and C++, which I work with on a daily basis) and how easy it is to express what’s in your mind. I’ve never had to stop and think, “how the hell can I implement this”, which is quite common with C++ in my case. In the current state, what is also amazing is how D is becoming a “batteries-included” package. Whatever you need, you just dub fetch it.

He’s implemented DPaste such that it requires very little in terms of maintenance costs. It automatically updates itself to the latest compiler release and also knows how to restart itself if the backend hangs for some reason. He says the only real issue he’s had to deal with over the past five years is spam, which has forced him to reimplement the captcha mechanism several times.

As for the future? He has a few things in mind.

I plan to rewrite the backend from scratch, open source it and use a docker image so anybody can easily pick up development or host his own backend (which is almost done). Functionally, I want to maintain different compiler versions like DMD 2.061.0, DMD 2.062.1, DMD 2.063.0, LDC 0.xx, GDC x.xx.xx, etc., and connect more architectures as backends (currently x86, arm and aarch64 are planned).

I also want to rewrite the frontend in D using vibe.d, websockets, and angular.js. In general, I would like to make the created applications more interactive. So, for example, you could use the output from your code snippet in realtime as it is produced. I would like also to split a middle end off from the frontend. The middle end would provide communication with backends and offer both a REST API and websockets. Then the frontend would be responsible purely for user interaction and nothing else.

He would also like to see DPaste become more official, perhaps through making it a part of dlang.org. And for a point further down the road, Damian has an even grander plan.

I hope to make a full blown online IDE for dlang.org with workspaces, compilers to chose, and so on.

That would be cool to see!

Testing In The D Standard Library

Jack Stouffer is a member of the Phobos team and a contributor to dlang.org. You can check out more of his writing on his blog.


In the D standard library, colloquially named Phobos, we take a multi-pronged approach to testing and code review. Currently, there are five different services any addition has to go through:

  1. The whole complier chain of tests: DMD’s and DRuntime’s test suite, and Phobos’s unit tests
  2. A documentation builder
  3. Coverage analysis
  4. A style checker
  5. And a community project builder/test runner

Using these, we’re able to automatically catch the vast majority of common problems that we see popping up in PRs. And we make regressions much less likely using the full test suite and examining coverage reports.

Hopefully this will provide some insight into how a project like a standard library can use testing in order to increase stability. Also, it can spark some ideas on how to improve your own testing and review process.

Unit Tests

In D, unit tests are an integrated part of the language rather than a library
feature:

size_t sum(int[] a)
{
    size_t result;

    foreach (e; a)
    {
        result += e;
    }

    return result;
}

unittest
{
    assert(sum([1, 2, 3]) == 6);
    assert(sum([0, 50, 100]) == 150);
}

void main() {}

Save this as test.d and run dmd -unittest -run test.d. Before your main function is run, all of the unittest blocks will be executed. If any of the asserts fail, execution is terminated and an error is printed to stderr.

The effect of putting unit tests in the language has been enormous. One of the main ones we’ve seen is tests no longer have the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Comprehensive tests in D projects are the rule and not the exception. Phobos dogfoods inline unittest blocks and uses them as its complete test suite. There are no other tests for Phobos than the inline tests, meaning for a reviewer to check their changes, they can just run dmd -main -unittest -run std/algorithm/searching.d (this is just for quick and dirty tests; full tests are done via make).

Every PR onto Phobos runs the inline unit tests, DMD’s tests, and the DRuntime tests on the following platforms:

  • Windows 32 and 64 bit
  • MacOS 32 and 64 bit
  • Linux 32 and 64 bit
  • FreeBSD 32 and 64 bit

This is done by Brad Roberts‘s auto-tester. As a quick aside, work is currently progressing to make bring D to iOS and Android.

Idiot Proof

In order to avoid pulling untested PRs, we have three mechanisms in place. First, only PRs which have at least one Github review by someone with pull rights can be merged.

Second, we don’t use the normal button for merging PRs. Instead, once a reviewer is satisfied with the code, we tell the auto-tester to merge the PR if and only if all tests have passed on all platforms.

Third, every single change to any of the official repositories has to go through the PR review process. This includes changes made by the BDFL Walter Bright and the Language Architect Andrei Alexandrescu. We have even turned off pushing directly to the master branch in Github to make sure that nothing gets around this.

Unit Tests and Examples

Unit tests in D solve the perennial problem of out of date docs by using the unit test code itself as the example code in the documentation. This way, documentation examples are part of the test suite rather than just some comment which will go out of date.

With this format, if the unit test goes out of date, then the test suite fails. When the tests are updated, the docs change automatically.

Here’s an example:

/**
 * Sums an array of `int`s.
 * 
 * Params:
 *      a = the array to sum
 * Returns:
 *      The sum of the array.
 */
size_t sum(int[] a)
{
    size_t result;

    foreach (e; a)
    {
        result += e;
    }

    return result;
}

///
unittest
{
    assert(sum([1, 2, 3]) == 6);
    assert(sum([0, 50, 100]) == 150);
}

// only tests with a doc string above them get included in the
// docs
unittest
{
    assert(sum([100, 100, 100]) == 300);
}

void main() {}

Run dmd -D test.d and it generates the following un-styled HTML:

Phobos uses this to great effect. The vast majority of examples in the Phobos documentation are from unittest blocks. For example, here is the documentation for std.algorithm.find and here is the unit test that generates that example.

This is not a catch all approach. Wholesale example programs, which are very useful when introducing a complex module or function, still have to be in comments.

Protecting Against Old Bugs

Despite our best efforts, bugs do find their way into released code. When they do, we require the person who’s patching the code to add in an extra unit test underneath the buggy function in order to protect against future regressions.

Docs

For Phobos, the documentation pages which were changed are generated on a test server for every PR. Developed by Vladimir Panteleev, the DAutoTest allows reviewers to compare the old page and the new page from one location.

For example, this PR changed the docs for two structs and their member functions. This page on DAutoTest shows a summary of the changed pages with links to view the final result.

Coverage

Perfectly measuring the effectiveness of a test suite is impossible, but we can get a good rough approximation with test coverage. For those unaware, coverage is a ratio which represents the number of lines of code that were executed during a test suite vs. lines that weren’t executed.

DMD has built-in coverage analysis to work in tandem with the built-in unit tests. Instead of dmd -unittest -run main.d, do dmd -unittest -cov -run main.d and a file will be generated showing a report of how many times each line of code was executed with a final coverage ratio at the end.

We generate this report for each PR. Also, we use codecov in order to get details on how well the new code is covered, as well as how coverage for the whole project has changed. If coverage for the patch is lower than 80%, then codecov marks the PR as failed.

At the time of writing, of the 77,601 lines of code (not counting docs or whitespace) in Phobos, 68,549 were covered during testing and 9,052 lines were not. This gives Phobos a test coverage of 88.3%, which is increasing all of the time. This is all achieved with the built in unittest blocks.

Project Tester

Because test coverage doesn’t necessarily “cover” all real world use cases and combinations of features, D uses a Jenkins server to download, build, and run the tests for a select number of popular D projects with the master branches of Phobos, DRuntime, and DMD. If any of the tests fail, the reviewers are notified.

Style And Anti-Pattern Checker

Having a code style set from on high stops a lot of pointless Internet flame wars (tabs vs spaces anyone?) dead in their tracks. D has had such a style guide for a couple of years now, but its enforcement in official code repos was spotty at best, and was mostly limited to brace style.

Now, we use CircleCI in order to run a series of bash scripts and the fantastically helpful dscanner which automatically checks for all sorts of things you shouldn’t be doing in your code. For example, CircleCI will give an error if it finds:

  • bad brace style
  • trailing whitespace
  • using whole module imports inside of functions
  • redundant parenthesis

And so on.

The automation of the style checker and coverage reports was done by Sebastian Wilzbach. dscanner was written by Brian Schott.

Closing Thoughts

We’re still working to improve somethings. Currently, Sebastian is writing a script to automatically check the documentation of every function for at least one example. Plus, the D Style Guide can be expanded to end arguments over the formatting of template constraints and other contested topics.

Practically speaking, other than getting the coverage of Phobos up to >= 95%, there’s not too much more to do. Phobos is one of the most throughly tested projects I’ve ever worked on, and it shows. Just recently, Phobos hit under 1000 open bugs, and that’s including enhancement requests.

The D Language Foundation Google Summer of Code 2016 Postmortem

Craig Dillabaugh was first drawn to D by its attractive syntax and Walter Bright’s statement that D is “a programming language, not a religion”. He maintains bindings to the geospatial libraries shapelib and gdal, volunteered to manage the GSoC 2015 & 2016 efforts for D, and has taken it on again for 2017. He lives near Ottawa, Canada, and works for a network monitoring/security company called Solana Networks.


The 2016 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) proved to be a great success for the D Language Foundation. Not only did we have, for us, a record number of slots allotted (four) and all projects completed successfully, perhaps most important of all we attracted four excellent students who will hopefully be long time contributors to the D Language and its community. This report serves as a review for the community of our GSoC efforts this past summer, and tries to identify some ways we can make 2017 an equal, or better, success.

Background

Back in 2011 and 2012, Digital Mars applied to participate in, and was accepted to, Google Summer of Code. In each of those years we were awarded three slots and had successful projects. Additionally, a number of long time D contributors, including David Nadlinger, Alex Bothe, and Dmitry Olshansky, were involved as students. Sadly, in the succeeding two years we were not awarded any slots. After 2014’s unsuccessful bid, Andrei asked on the forums if anyone wanted to take the lead for the 2015 GSoC, as he had too many things on his plate. This is when I decided to volunteer for the job.

I prepared for the 2015 GSoC and worked on getting some solid items for our Ideas page. I even prepared what I thought was a beautifully typeset document in LaTeX for our final submission. Needless to say, I was very disappointed when I had to copy/paste each section into the simple web form that Google provided for submissions. Sadly, that year we were rejected once more, though I felt our list of ideas was solid.

We applied again in 2016 for the first time as The D Language Foundation. Again, the community contributed lots of solid suggestions for the Ideas page and we were accepted for the first time in four years. I think that perhaps getting accepted involves a bit of luck, as our ideas were similar to, or repeated from, those that were not accepted in 2015. However, more effort was put into polishing up the page, so perhaps that helped.

The Selection Process

Once we were accepted as a mentoring organization, the process of receiving student proposals began. We received interest from a large number of students from all over the world (about 35). In the end, a total of 23 proposals were officially submitted, ranging from very short–obviously last minute–pieces, to several excellent efforts, including Sebastian Wilzbach’s 20-page document.

Our selection process was, I felt, very rigorous. We had seven of our potential admins/mentors screen the initial proposals. This involved reading all 23 proposals, which was a significant amount of work. From this initial screening we identified eight students/proposals that we thought could become successful projects. We then had all mentors individually rank each of the shortlisted proposals, another significant time commitment on their part.

Finally, interviews were arranged with all eight students. In most cases, two mentors interviewed each student, and the interviews were fairly intense, job-style interviews that involved coding exercises. A number of our mentors were involved in this process, but I think Amaury Sechet interviewed all of the students. It is no small feat to arrange and then conduct interviews with students in so many different time zones, so a huge thanks to all the mentors, but Amaury in particular. Those involved in the screening/interview process included Andrei Alexandrescu, Ilya Yaroshenko, Adam Ruppe, Adam Wilson, Dragos Carp, Russel Winder, Robert Schadek, Amaury, and myself.

Awarding of Slots

The next step for our organization was to decide how many slots we would request from Google. I really had no idea what to expect, but I was hoping we might get two slots awarded to us, as there were many good organizations vying for a limited number of slots. We felt that most of the short-listed projects could have been successful, but decided to not be too greedy and requested just four slots. As it turned out, perhaps we should have asked for more; we were awarded all four. We then selected our top four ranked students from the interview process. They were, in no particular order:

  • Sebastian Wilzbach: Science for D – a non-uniform RNG (Ilya Yaroshenko mentor)
  • Lodovico Giaretta: Phobos: std.xml (Robert Schadek mentor)
  • Wojciech Szeszol: Improvements to DStep (Russel Winder mentor)
  • Jeremy DeHaan: Precise Garbage Collector (Adam Wilson mentor)

Summer of Code

Once the projects were awarded, I must say that most of my work was done. From there on the mentors and students got down to work. I tried to keep tabs on progress and asked for regular updates from both the mentors and the students. These were, in most cases, promptly provided.

While there were some challenges, and a few projects had to be modified slightly in some instances, everyone progressed steadily throughout the summer, so there were no emergencies to deal with. All of our students passed their mid-term evaluations and by the end of the summer all four projects were completed (although Jeremy has some on-going work on his precise GC). As a result, everyone got paid and, I presume, everyone was happy.

In addition to our original mentors, thanks are due to Jacob Carlborg (DStep) and Joseph Rushton Wakeling (RNG) for providing additional expertise.

Mentor Summit

Google offered money for students to attend academic conferences and present results based on their GSoC work. Google also offered to pay travel costs for two mentors to travel to the mentor summit in California. Regrettably, none of our students had the time to take advantage of the conference money, but Robert Schadek was able to attend the Mentor Summit from Oct 28th to 30th in Sunnyvale, California. There he was able mingle with, and learn from, mentors from the other organizations that participated.

Looking Forward

It is hard to believe, but the process starts all over again in a few short months. The success of this past year will create expectations for 2017, and I hope that we can replicate that success. A number of lessons were learned from this past year that we can carry forward into the next round. So in this section, I will try to distill some of what we learned to help guide our efforts in the coming year.

The Ideas Page and Advertising

Most of the work of identifying projects was carried out through the D Forums, with the odd email to past mentors. This was generally successful, but a number of proposals from previous years ended up being recycled. While it may be inevitable, it seemed that many of the proposal ideas were added at the last minute. Since a number of our best ideas from the 2016 page are now completed projects, we will need to replenish the Ideas page for 2017.
Recommendations

  1. We should post a PDF version of one of the successful proposals on our Ideas page to give students an example of what we expect. Although it was excellent, we likely shouldn’t use Sebastian Wilzbach’s treatise, as that may scare some people off.
  2. Try to get a decent set of solid proposals with committed mentors earlier in the process. In 2016 a number of the mentors were signed up at the last minute. The earlier the proposals are posted the more time we have to polish them and make them look more attractive.

Interview and Selection Process

The selection process went well, but was a lot of work. Having input from a number of different mentors/individuals was invaluable.
Recommendations

  1. Streamline the selection process, but reuse much of what was done last year. Having a rigorous selection process was a key contributor to 2016’s success.
  2. Start the interview portion of the selection process earlier so that we have more time to set up and carry out the interviews.

Project Progress and Mentoring

Much of the success of an individual project involves having a good relationship and work plan between the student and mentor. From this perspective, the organization isn’t heavily involved. Since all of our students worked well with their mentors, even less organizational administration was required. This is a byproduct of good screening and a solid set of ideas, and being fortunate enough to get good students.

However, there are areas where we could have run things a bit better. Students and mentors were asked to regularly provide updates on their progress, and they generally did this well, but there was no formal reporting process. Also, it would be worthwhile to have a centralized collection of project timelines/milestones where administrators and others involved in the projects (we had a few individuals working in advisory roles) can keep an eye on project progress.

Recommendations

  1. We should keep a centralized version of project timelines somewhere (ie. Google Docs Spreadsheet) where we can check on project milestones. This should be shared with all individuals involved in a project (student/mentors/advisors/admins).
  2. Have a more formalized process for students and mentors reporting on their progress. This would involve weekly student updates and biweekly mentor updates.

Summary

The 2016 GSoC was a great success, and with any luck will be a good foundation for our successful participation in the year to come. We were fortunate that everything seemed to fall nicely into place, from our being awarded all four projects, to having all of our students complete their projects. Perhaps Sebastian, Lodovico, Wojciech or Jeremy will be involved again as students (or even mentors), and in any case continue to contribute to the D Language.

The D Blog in 2016: Seven Months of Page Views

The D Blog was born at DConf 2016 and the first post was published on June 3rd. There were 27 more posts between then and the end of the year, most of which were shared on the usual social media sites. In case some of you in DLand are curious about such things, a year-end stats post is a fun way to kick off the new year.

First, we welcomed 39,471 visitors who viewed a total of 53,013 pages. The top five referrers in terms of page views:

  1. 16,604 — Reddit
  2.  3,698 — The D Forums
  3.  3,123 — Hacker News
  4.  2,847 — Twitter
  5.  1,759 — Facebook

The top five countries in terms of page views:

  1. 17,244 — United States
  2.  4,427 — Germany
  3.  3,349 — United Kingdom
  4.  2,251 — Canada
  5.  1,598 — France

Several posts included links to D projects at GitHub. Counting both projects and profiles, the top five most-clicked were:

  1. dlangui
  2. atrium
  3. Timur Gafurov
  4. voxelman
  5. dlib

The single most-clicked page was the DLangUI screenshot page.

Finally, the top six posts in terms of page views:

  1. 5,865 — Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We Fixed It
  2. 5,602 — Ruminations on D: An Interview with Walter Bright
  3. 4,267 — Project Highlight: DLangUI
  4. 2,704 — Programming in D: A Happy Accident
  5. 2,579 — Project Highlight: Timur Gafarov
  6. 2,257 — Project Highlight: Voxelman

The list of posts was intended to be a top-five, but it was interesting that Voxelman was posted only on December 30th and managed to become the sixth most-viewed post on the site.

2016 was the time for the blog to find its sea legs. The coming year will see more Project Highlights and more guest posters (including Andrei and Walter). We’re also looking to expand the scope somewhat, so keep your eyes open for new types of content.

If you would like to write for the D blog, please go and contact the fellow who owns this GitHub profile, where he’s showing his email address for the world to see. He would be happy to discuss posts about your D projects, idioms you like to use, tutorials you’d like to share, or anything related to the D Programming Language.

Thanks for tuning in, and Happy 2017!

Happy New Year from the D Language Foundation

Ali Çehreli uses D professionally at Weka.io, is the author of Programming in D, and is frequently found in the D Learn forum with ready answers to questions on using the language. He also is an officer of the D Language Foundation.


Happy 2017!

2016 was filled with many great things happening for the D community:

All of that was achieved by you through your direct contributions or the donations that you’ve made.

We look forward to another great year filled with many cool things happening in the D world. We can’t wait to see your work on D in 2017, some of which we hope to hear about at DConf 2017. 😀