Nearly all non-trivial programs allocate and manage memory. Getting it right is becoming increasingly important, as programs get ever more complex and mistakes get ever more costly. The usual problems are: memory leaks (failure to free memory when no longer in use) double frees (freeing memory more than once) use-after-free (continuing to refer to memory … Continue reading Ownership and Borrowing in D
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Fuzzing Your D Application with LDC and AFL
Posted onFuzzing, or fuzz testing, is a powerful method to find hidden bugs in your application. The basic idea is to present random input to your application and monitor how it behaves. If it crashes or shows some other unusual behavior then you have found a bug. The use of true random input is not very … Continue reading Fuzzing Your D Application with LDC and AFL
Read more...Flexible Default Function Parameters via structs with Nullable Fields
Posted onThe problem Sometimes we need to combine an aggregate of a set of values with an aggregate of the corresponding set of default values to create a combined result. The result for each member is either the explicitly specified value or, where no value is specified, the default value. This is similar to default function … Continue reading Flexible Default Function Parameters via structs with Nullable Fields
Read more...DStep 1.0.0
Posted onDStep is a tool for automatically generating D bindings for C and Objective-C libraries. This is implemented by processing C or Objective-C header files and outputting D modules. DStep uses the Clang compiler as a library (libclang) to process the header files. Background The first version of DStep was released on the 7th of July, … Continue reading DStep 1.0.0
Read more...Project Highlight: DPP
Posted onD was designed from the beginning to be ABI compatible with C. Translate the declarations from a C header file into a D module and you can link directly with the corresponding C library or object files. The same is true in the other direction as long as the functions in the D code are … Continue reading Project Highlight: DPP
Read more...Memoization in the D Programming Language
Posted onThe D programming language provides advanced facilities for structuring programs logically, almost like Python or Ruby, but with high performance and the higher reliability of static typing and contract programming. In this article, I will describe how to use D templates and mixins for memoization, that is, to automatically remember a function (or property) result. … Continue reading Memoization in the D Programming Language
Read more...Using const to Enforce Design Decisions
Posted onThe saying goes that the best code is no code. As soon as a project starts to grow, technical debt is introduced. When a team is forced to adapt to a new company guideline inconsistent with their previous vision, the debt results from a business decision. This could be tackled at the company level. Sometimes … Continue reading Using const to Enforce Design Decisions
Read more...Containerize Your D Server Application
Posted onA container consists of an application packed together with all of its required dependencies. The container is run as an isolated process on Linux or Windows. The Docker tool has made the handling of containers very popular and is now the de-facto standard for deploying containers to a cloud environment. In this blog post I … Continue reading Containerize Your D Server Application
Read more...Writing a D Wrapper for a C Library
Posted onIn porting to D a program I created for a research project, I wrote a D wrapper of a C library in an object-oriented manner. I want to share my experience with other programmers. This article provides some D tips and tricks for writers of D wrappers around C libraries. I initially started my research … Continue reading Writing a D Wrapper for a C Library
Read more...Lost in Translation: Encapsulation
Posted onD programmers come from a variety of programming backgrounds, C-family languages perhaps being the most common among them. Understanding the differences and how familiar features are tailored to D can open the door to more possibilities for organizing a code base, and designing and implementing an API. This article is the first of a few that will examine D features that can be overlooked or misunderstood by those experienced in similar languages.
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