Category Archives: D Foundation

News Update: Swag, Platforms, Documentation Help and More

Here are a few updates on things that have been going on both in front of and behind the scenes of the D Programming Language community.

New D Swag

We’ve got some new items in the DLang Swag Emporium: t-shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers sporting the Royal D logo. (If all Royal D items aren’t showing up for you in the Royal D category, check the D Rocket category. Everything should be in the correct location in a day or two).

You may notice that there are fewer options on the product page than for the other items, i.e. only one mug and sticker, and no dark tee option. They are available, though! When you select one of the existing products, you can change the style of the selection to one of several options. Beware! This may also change the price.

Remember, a small percentage of every item you order from the DLang Swag Emporium goes into the D Language Foundation’s General Fund. Plus, if you click through the link above or on the blog’s sidebar, we’ll get an additional referral fee on top of the item royalty. It’s an easy way to both get some D swag and contribute a few bucks to the Foundation.

Expanded Platform Progress

You maybe aware that some work has been ongoing in getting D onto more platforms. Adam Ruppe was working on contract to get LDC’s Android support to the finish line. He wrapped things up a few weeks back and has been paid out of the Foundation’s HR Fund.

Sebastiaan Koppe has been working on contract to get DRuntime ported to WebAssembly. Progress is ongoing and we currently expect it to be mostly wrapped up by the end of March. Like Adam, he’ll be out of the HR Fund when the contract is complete.

Work is also underway to bring LDC to iOS and iPadOS. We had been hoping to get someone to work on contract for this, but there are few people we know who are familiar enough with the platform to get it done and we were unable to find anyone then with the time to work on it. So we put up a bounty for it and kept our fingers crossed.

Recently, you may have seen forum posts from Jacob Carlborg indicating he’s been working on it in his spare time. Some preliminary support was merged in the LDC 1.20.0 release. Although he isn’t working under contract, he is working toward the bounty. That means anyone who wants to support him can contribute by increasing the bounty. Two contributors have already done so. The base amount of $3000 will be taken from the HR Fund when the work is complete.

And speaking of bounties, there are several others waiting for someone to claim them!

The HR Fund

With one payout from the fund and two coming up, we need to replenish it so we can always have cash earmarked for more contract work and bounties. You can make one-time or recurring donations of any amount directly and receive the same rewards available on our Open Collective page, or you can use a different link to make a $60 donation and get a DConf 2019 t-shirt in return. We’ve still got a few shirts available, so help us get rid of them and boost the HR Fund at the same time!

Documentation Event

Behind-the-scenes discussions about ideas to improve the D ecosystem in one way or another are frequently cycling through the inboxes of the people who can make them happen. Most never see the light of day, but there is one that has great potential. If it all comes together, I’ll be able to announce it in the coming weeks. We need your help to make that happen.

We need some specifics regarding areas where the documentation for D and items in the the D ecosystem is lacking. For example, people often complain about inconsistencies in the D spec, and missing info or examples in the DUB and vibe.d docs.

I’ve started a thread in the D forums where you can post your gripes about incomplete/missing/lackluster documentation. Remember, we need you to be specific. Just saying “the DUB docs are incomplete” doesn’t help. What specifically is missing? Or what specifically is wrong? The more information you can provide the better. And the more examples we can collect the better. The goal is to be able to define specific documentation tasks that anyone with the requisite knowledge can complete.

If we can get enough examples with enough detail, then I should be able to announce a new event sponsored by one of our generous benefactors. And I really want to be able to announce it!

DConf 2020

We really want to see a flood of talk submissions this year. If you’ve never been to DConf, or never presented at any conference, don’t let that stop you! Send us your submission and you may end up with a free trip to the conference.

Also, if you pay for an early-bird registration now (a 15% discount over the regular registration rate) and your talk is selected later, we’ll reimburse your registration fee. So if you’re planning to attend the conference even if your talk isn’t selected, it’s a good idea to register now and avoid the risk of missing the early-bird deadline.

We’re also offering once again the Open Source and Academic Discount; if you are a major open source contributor, a student, or an academic, we’ll give you a 50% discount on the regular registration rate. If you think you qualify, please don’t hesitate to take advantage of it by contacting social@dlang.org (or you can contact me directly at aldacron@gmail.com) for details on how to take advantage.

Finally, we never want to leave anyone out of DConf because they can’t afford to pay. This has been a policy of Walter’s from the beginning. If you are in or around London June 17 – 20 and would like to attend DConf but are unable to afford the registration and/or don’t qualify for the special discount, please email one of the addresses above and we’ll work something out.

DConf 2020: Submission Deadline, Early-Bird Registration, and Invited Keynote

In early January, I announced that Symmetry Investments is bringing DConf back to London for our 2020 edition. At the same time, I said we’d start taking submissions from anyone who wanted to send them in. In the interim, we’ve fixed our deadlines and prepared to start accepting reservations. There was only one thing remaining before I was ready for the formal call for submissions and opening of early-bird registrations: confirming our invited keynote speaker. Now that he has confirmed, it’s all official!

Invited Keynote

We’re excited to welcome Roberto Ierusalimschy to DConf 2020! You may know him from his work as the leading architect of the Lua programming language. He’s the author of Programming in Lua and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro).

We don’t know yet what his talk will about, but it can be about any topic he wants. We’ll have more information on that for you when we publish the schedule of all selected talks after April 19.

Call for Submissions

We are accepting submissions for DConf 2020 until April 12. Authors will be notified of their final status by April 19.

We’re eager to see some new faces on the stage this year. If you’ve never presented at a DConf before, please don’t hesitate to send us one or more submissions. One person has already sent in seven!

Unless you’re Roberto Ierusalimschy, we prefer topics that are directly or indirectly related to D. We aren’t intransigent, though, so we’re willing to consider other topics. If someone sends us a proposal that isn’t about D but piques our collective interest, we’ll certainly give it serious consideration.

Having a talk selected is a great way to get to DConf if you’re on a budget. You’ll pay no registration fee, plus we’ll reimburse your transportation and lodging costs (within reason—five-star hotels and business- or first-class plane tickets aren’t on the menu). That’s a pretty good deal.

You can find instructions for writing and submitting your submissions on the DConf 2020 homepage.

Early-Bird Registration

Early-bird registration is available at $340, which is 15% off the regular $400 rate. Because we’re being sponsored by Symmetry in London once more, we once again must include a 20% VAT. So the total early-bird rate is $408 (similarly, the regular rate with VAT will be $480). We’re required by UK law to show you the basic rate and VAT in GBP based on the current HMRC exchange rate. That changes every month, so you can see the latest GPB rates in the registration section of the DConf 2020 homepage.

There, you’ll find options for Flipcause and PayPal. From our perspective, we prefer you use our Flipcause form. That gives you the option to cover the credit card processing fee for us so that 100% of your payment can be put toward DConf expenses. If you choose to uncheck that option, that’s fine, too! It will still save us from paying other fees. Every penny we can put toward the expenses helps.

If you do choose to go through PayPal, you have an option for USD and one for GBP. Some registrants told me last year that they get a GBP option even when clicking the USD button. And of course, some register with GBP-based credit cards. However, the GBP button on the DConf 2020 homepage is a fixed amount based on the current HMRC exchange rate. It changes, but only once a month. It may turn out to be cheaper for you than the rate you get from PayPal or your credit card provider. Of course, it could turn out to be more expensive, so if you’re looking to save a few pounds, you may want to investigate the different exchange rates if they apply to your situation.

And Now For Something Completely Different

DConf isn’t the only event Symmetry Investments is sponsoring these days. We recently wrapped up the 2019 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code.

This year, we started with five participants working on five interesting projects. Each participant was to complete a total of four milestones over four months with guidance from a mentor. At the successful completion of the first three milestones, each participant would receive $1000. At the end of the fourth and final milestone, one participant would be selected to receive one more $1000 payment and an all-expense paid trip to DConf.

As the event played out, we lost one of the participants at the end of Milestone 2. Two more were unable to fully commit to the Milestone 4 deadline (though they promised to continue working on their projects after SAOC). That left two participants for the SAOC review committee to select from. It was a very difficult decision, as both participants did excellent work and received glowing evaluations from their mentors.

Now I can announce that the SAOC 2019 finalist was Roberto Rosmaninho!

Roberto, with his mentor Nicholas Wilson, worked on adding support for Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) to LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler. He is currently working on putting together pull requests for LDC and intends to work on optimizations going forward. He has also confirmed that he will take advantage of his reward so that we will have at least two Robertos at DConf this year.

As we did last year with Francesco Gallà, the SAOC 2018 finalist, we’ve asked Roberto to submit a talk this year. He promised to do so. We can’t promise his talk will be selected (though the odds are high out of the gate), but he still gets a free trip if it isn’t! Besides, we’re looking forward to meeting him.

On behalf of the D Language Foundation and Symmetry Investments, I want to thank everyone who participated in SAOC 2019. Keep an eye on this blog for news about future events.

Now go prep your DConf 2020 submissions!

DConf 2020: Double Decker Edition

To kick off the year of double 20’s (or double X’s if you prefer), the D Language Foundation is excited to announce that DConf 2020 will return to 99 City Road for a second round in London! We had such a great time last year that we were over the moon when we heard that our DConf 2019 hosts and sponsors at Symmetry Investments were willing to do it all again in 2020. The venue’s Sinisa Poznanovic will be back live streaming the talks on the D Language Foundation’s YouTube channel, and all of the talks will once again be recorded in HD via the capable hands of the Stage Engage crew.

Since DConf 2013, our annual D gathering has taken place each year in May. This time, we’re breaking tradition by running the conference in the middle of June. Our usual three days of talks will take place June 17th – 19th, followed by our annual DConf Hackathon on the 20th. There’s a reason we picked these dates, but it’s tied to an announcement I hope to make some time in the next few weeks. My fingers are crossed that things work out the way we intend and that I can make that announcement sooner rather than later.

Early-bird registration will open in the near future. From now, we’re accepting submissions. If you’ve got an idea for a talk or a panel, don’t be shy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a D veteran or a D noob, if you’ve spoken at multiple DConfs or spoken at none (or never spoken in public at all). We’re eager to see submissions from any and all, but we’re particularly interested in seeing some new faces at the lectern this year. If your talk gets selected, you can plan your trip to London and, as a speaker, you’ll be eligible for reimbursement for the cost of your transportation and lodgings. If your talk doesn’t make the cut, you lose nothing. So head to the DConf 2020 web site for the details and send us your submission!

Additionally, we’re currently working out the details of a potential event peripheral to the conference itself. If all goes well and the plans come to fruition, I’ll announce it here as soon as I’m able (otherwise, I’ll have just teased you for no reason whatsoever). We’ve also got an eye out for opportunities like the walking tours we organized before the conference last year. I don’t know which ideas or opportunities will materialize this year, but I do want you to know that we’re looking.

So start making your plans, send your thanks to Laeeth and Symmetry Investments (if you’re so inclined) for taking on a second DConf and for everything they’ve done and continue to do for the D community, and send us your submissions!

Goings-on in DLand

The blog has been quiet for the past month, largely because I’ve been busy. I’ve had a couple of articles submitted to me which were a little light on content, so I asked the authors to flesh them out some more. Both are busy at the moment, but I’ll check back in with them in the New Year.

In the interim, I figured I’m due for a new update. I’m also working on the next article in my D and C series, which I hope to publish soon. If you’ve got something you’d like to say, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I can’t promise I’ll publish your article, but if it checks all but a few boxes I’ll be happy to work with you to check off the rest. I’m also open to Project Highlights. If you’ve got a project to show off, let me know and I’ll tell you how to proceed. The D Language Foundation pays a bounty for most guest contributions, so it’s a relatively easy way to make some cash. Speaking of bounties…

Task Bounties

Don’t forget that we’ve got 8 open task bounties awaiting someone to claim them. You can also make a contribution to increase the bounties for the tasks you’re concerned about by clicking on the corresponding card on that page. Click the first card on the page if you’d like to seed a new bounty with a contribution, but be sure to include a note with a Bugzilla issue number or a request that I contact you for details. Once we’ve got it sorted, I’ll create a new card for your task and assign the seeded amount.

I’ll be adding some new tasks to the page in January. We’d all love to see some of the existing tasks closed out before then!

Contract Work

Some readers may be aware that Adam Ruppe is working on contract for the D Language Foundation to take LDC’s Android support to completion. It looks like he’s not too far away from the finish line. You can read about his progress and his JNI module in the latest installment of This Week in D.

Back in October, Sebastiaan Koppe posted a comment in a forum thread where the OP asked what was holding up D support for WebAssembly. Sebastiaan at that point had made a few announcements about his Spasm project and posted some demos, but there was still a lot of work to be done. His response to the question:

The short answer is manpower…With D the main issue is that someone needs to port druntime to wasm. I am working on it in my spare time, but progress is slow.

I wondered if there was a way to speed things along. After securing permission from the people in charge of the Foundation’s purse strings and discussing the details with Sebastiaan, he agreed to make a dedicated effort to get the project done on contract. He needed a few weeks before he could get started. He also wanted to draw up a document detailing his approach and ask for feedback. That resulted in a forum thread, Proposal for porting D runtime to WebAssembly.

I’m happy to report that the contract has since been signed and the work is underway!

The Human Resource Fund and More

Both Adam and Sebastiaan will be paid from our Human Resource Fund, which WekaIO seeded and expanded through two generous donations. We are thankful to everyone who has donated so far, but we need to keep growing it. There’s a good deal of work out there that can improve the ecosystem if we have the money to throw at it. You can donate directly through the Human Resource Fund donation page, where we apply the same rewards as listed on our OpenCollective page, or you can donate $60 through our special donation page and we’ll send you a DConf 2019 t-shirt.

We also welcome direct donations to our General Fund. You can make indirect donations by shopping through AmazonSmile at smile.amazon.com and selecting the D Language Foundation as your preferred charity. We’ll receive a small percentage of your purchases through that URL (and we’re only available through the .com domain, not .uk, .de, .jp, or any other Amazon domain). There are browser extensions, such as Smile Always for Chrome and Smart Amazon for Firefox, that will automatically send you to the smile subdomain when you visit amazon.com. You can also turn on AmazonSmile in the Amazon Mobile App.

Purchases through the DLang Swag Emporium also send money to the general fund. We get a commission on every item sold, but if you visit through this link (or the one in the sidebar) which contains our referral number, we’ll get referral commissions on any item you buy on your visit to Zazzle, including those in our own store. We’re selling D-themed coffee mugs, stickers, t-shirts, hoodies and now wrapping paper. We’ll be adding more items and more emblems as time goes by. So far, you’ve helped us raise $135.05.

SAOC 2019

SAOC 2019 Milestone 3 wraps up on December 15. The final round kicks off the same day. Out of five who started the event back in September, four remain. The reviewers have largely been pleased with their efforts so far. At the end of Milestone 4 in January, only one of the four remaining participants will be eligible for the final $1000 payment and the award of a free trip to DConf 2020.

The participants are supposed to be posting weekly updates in the General forum, so you can follow their progress there. After the event, I’ll ask those who didn’t get the grand prize to write about their projects and their SAOC experience here on the blog.

The D Language Foundation, the SAOC reviewers, and I wish good luck to all of the participants as they enter the final stretch. They’ve been working hard and picking one “winner” isn’t going to be easy!

DConf 2020

Preparations for DConf 2020 are well underway. At the moment, I’m waiting on the news that the venue contract has been signed and delivered. As soon as I hear that, I’ll come straight to the blog with the announcement. I’m hoping to be able to announce our invited keynote at the same time, but I’ll not delay the main announcement for it.

What I can tell you now is that we’ll have a longer submission period this year. We’ll also keep the registrations open longer. We’re aiming to bring new people in and are currently discussing a special event with that goal in mind. That will require an advertising budget this time around. We did some advertising for DConf 2018 and learned some lessons in the process. We hope to apply them to better effect for 2020. Any donations you can make to the General Fund will help us toward that end.

Keep it Going

Thanks to all who have contributed their time, their energy, and their money to help make the D language and the D community what they are today. We’ve come a long way since the day I first stumbled upon the Digital Mars website in the summer of 2003. But there’s always more work to do. Newcomers to D have no perception of what came before, only of the way things are when they arrive. We need to continually improve the DLang experience, meet the expectations that surround a modern programming language, and live up to the ideal. That means we are always in need of more donations of time, energy, and money. If you have any to spare, we welcome it!

My Vision of D’s Future

When Andrei Alexandrescu stepped down as deputy leader of the D programming language, I was asked to take over the role going forward. It’s needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, that those are some pretty big shoes to fill.

I’m still settling into my new role in the community and figuring out how I want to do things and what those things even are. None of this happens in a vacuum either, since Walter needs to be on board as well.

I was asked on the D forums to write a blog post on my “dreams and way forward for D”, so here it is. What I’d like to happen with D in the near future:

Memory safety

“But D has a GC!”, I hear you exclaim. Yes, but it’s also a systems programming language with value types and pointers, meaning that today, D isn’t memory safe. DIP1000 was a step in the right direction, but we have to be memory safe unless programmers opt-out via a “I know what I’m doing” @trusted block or function. This includes transitioning to @safe by default.

Safe and easy concurrency

We’re mostly there—using the actor model eliminates a lot of problems that would otherwise naturally occur. We need to finalize shared and make everything @safe as well.

Make D the default implementation language

D’s static reflection and code generation capabilities make it an ideal candidate to implement a codebase that needs to be called from several different languages and environments (e.g. Python, Excel, R, …). Traditionally this is done by specifying data structures and RPC calls in an Interface Definition Language (IDL) then translating that to the supported languages, with a wire protocol to go along with it.

With D, none of that is necessary. One can write the production code in D and have libraries automagically make that code callable from other languages. Add to all of this that it’s possible and easy to write D code that runs as fast or faster than the alternatives, and it’s a win on all fronts.

Second to none reflection.

Instead of disparate ways of getting things done with fragmented APIs (__traits, std.traits, custom code), I’d like for there to be a library that centralizes all reflection needs with a great API. I’m currently working on it.

Easier interop with C++.

As I mentioned in my DConf 2019 talk, C++ has had the success it’s enjoyed so far by making the transition from C virtually seamless. I want current C++ programmers with legacy codebases to just as easily be able to start writing D code. That’s why I wrote dpp, but it’s not quite there yet and we might have to make language changes to accommodate this going forward.

Fast development times.

I think we need a ridiculously fast interpreter so that we can skip machine code generation and linking. To me, this should be the default way of running unittest blocks for faster feedback, with programmers only compiling their code for runtime performance and/or to ship binaries to final users. This would also enable a REPL.

String interpolation

I was initially against this, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense for D. Why? String mixins. Code generation is one of D’s greatest strengths, and token strings enable visually pleasing blocks of code that are actually “just strings”. String interpolation would make them vastly easier to use. As it happens, there’s a draft DIP for it in the pipeline.

That’s what I came up with after a long walk by Lake Geneva. I’d love to know what the community thinks of this, what their pet peeves and pet features would be, and how they think this would help or hinder D going forward.

D Language Foundation Funding: New Platforms, New Bounties

Digital Mars logo When I first announced the HR Fund here on the blog back in April, there was talk among the D Language Foundation team of hiring one or more people to flesh out the specification and implementation of shared. That sort of work requires a very specific skillset that only a few people in the orbit of D possess. So far, we’ve been unable to find any of them with the time to spare. Meanwhile, the HR Fund is sitting there, waiting to be used.

Mobile Support for LDC

A few weeks ago, Ethan Watson wrote a post in the D forums titled, DMD or LDC on mobile. That thread, followed up by emails with Ethan and a few other people, presented a great opportunity to start putting the HR fund to use. Given that LDC already has support for ARM and DMD does not, it’s more practical to fund efforts on LDC than on DMD

As Adam Ruppe has suggested in the forums, he is currently working under contract to complete the existing work on Android support for LDC. By the time he’s finished, it should be possible for anyone to build a D application for Android and distribute it through the Play Store.

The iOS story, unfortunately, hasn’t yet moved forward. We had the ideal candidate on board and eager to get started, but he was sadly unable to get the time off from work that he would need to get the job done. We’ve asked around, looking for someone else with the same skillset to take on the task, but have come up empty. So now we’re reaching to the community at large. But with a twist…

New Task Bounties

Back in August, I announced that we had launched a new Bug Bounty system. The term “Bug” was perhaps too restrictive, so I’ve renamed the menu to Task Bounties. And as of today the D Language Foundation has seeded three new bounties: two for Bugzilla issues and one for the aforementioned LDC project.

The D Language Foundation has put forward $3000 to seed the bounty to add iOS and iPadOS support to LDC. We encourage anyone interested in seeing this task complete to donate to increase the bounty.

This isn’t a typical bounty, as the money will only be paid as the result of contract work. As such, the money to seed it comes from the HR fund. So if you’re interested in taking the bounty home, click the image above and read the bounty description. We want to get this completed as soon as possible, else we’d wait for our original candidate to become available. So if you have the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities to get the job done, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The Foundation seeded two Bugzilla bounties (from the General Fund) at $50 each: one for issue #18472 (betterC: cannot use format at compile time) and the other for issue #18062 (ddoc: Generated .html files should retain the package hierarchy). Click through those links to increase the bounties, or visit Bugzilla #18472 or Bugzilla #18062 for the bug details to get started on fixing one.

I’d like to thank the members of the dlang-jp community for bringing these bugs to our attention. I recently met three of them in Tokyo along with Átila Neves. Aside from having a great time hanging out and touring part of Asakusa, we had a good chat about D and the Japanese D community. I look forward to the next opportunity to see them.

We’ll be seeding more Bugzilla bounties in the coming weeks. I’ll be digging into some of the old #dbugfix issues that are still open. If you have a bug that’s particularly troubling you, please consider seeding a bounty for it yourself. Alternatively, post a link to it on Twitter with the #dbugfix hashtag and we’ll consider the possibility of seeding a bounty with Foundation money.

Please visit the Task Bounties page to see if anything else there strikes your fancy!

The HR Fund Status

The HR Fund currently sits at $16,345. We’re about to lose some of it to Adam for his work on Android and (hopefully) more to someone who takes on the iOS task. Currently, we’re looking into other opportunities to put some of it to use. We still have dreams of funding major work, so we need to continue to make the HR Fund grow.

You can help us by donating to the HR Fund campaign directly, or by using our special $60 campaign: donate $60 to the HR Fund and get a DConf 2019 t-shirt. We still have several shirts available, scattered throughout the world, so please take one off of someone’s hands!

AmazonSmile

In a previous post, I mentioned the AmazonSmile plugins Smile Always for Chrome and Smart Amazon Smile for Firefox as easy ways to support the D Language Foundation. These plugins ensure that every time you visit amazon.com you will be sent to smile.amazon.com instead to support your selected charity. If its the D Language Foundation, we get 0.5% of every eligible purchase you make (and sorry to the international folks, but the D Language Foundation is only available as a charity through the .com domain).

Now, you can also support the D Language Foundation through the Amazon Shopping App for Android. Visit the AmazonSmile Mobile page to see how.

SAOC 2019 Projects and Participants

Last Sunday, August 18, was the deadline for Symmetry Autumn of Code 2019 applications. We received a total of eight applications, which is the same number we saw last year. This time around we were able to accept more than three: five of the applicants will be participating.

The applications were reviewed by the five members of the SAOC 2019 Committee. Each member independently ranked the applications in order of preference. Points were assigned based on the rankings and the top five applications were accepted.

Before we get into the details of the projects, on behalf of the D Language Foundation and the SAOC team, I’d like to publicly thank all eight applicants for taking the time to submit an application. I’d also like to thank Laeeth Isharc and Symmetry Investments for sponsoring the event again this year, and our five SAOC Committee members for volunteering their time throughout the event: John Colvin, Mathias Lang, Átila Neves, Robert Schadek, and Ethan Watson. They will be monitoring the progress of each project through the milestone reports and ultimately will select one participant to receive an extra $1000 payment and an all-expense paid trip to DConf 2020.

The Projects

Multi-Level Intermediate Representation Support for LDC – According to the MLIR project README, it’s “a common intermediate representation” intended to “unify the infrastructure required to execute high performance machine learning models in TensorFlow and similar ML frameworks”. Roberto Rosmaninho’s primary project goal is to provide the LDC D compiler with “a new level of abstraction to support the integration of MLIR into the D ecosystem”. Roberto is working on a Computer Science major and is an undergraduate research assistant at Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. His mentor for the project is Nicholas Wilson.
Implement DIP 1014 and expand support for C++ STL containers – Suleyman Sahmi’s main goal is to “advance the existing work on [the] D interface to C++ STL containers”. There is a project at GitHub geared toward that end which Manu Evans and Laeeth Isharc have been working on and which is blocked on the lack of an implementation for DIP 1014, along with a few issues with the D ABI and name mangling. He first intends to implement DIP 1014, then he’ll resolve several of the related DMD bugs and will use the remaining time to expand support for the C++ STL. Suleyman is a self-taught programmer from Morocco and already has become a contributor to DMD.
DPP with Linux kernel headers – The DPP tool, which allows D modules to directly #include C and C++ headers, currently is unable to work with the Linux kernel headers. Cristian Becerescu aims to fix that. If he is able to do so with time remaining, he will work on further improvements and refinements to DPP, including ironing out issues it might have with other C library headers the community brings to his attention. Cristian is a 4th-year Computer Science and Engineering student at University Politehnica of Bucharest. He is fortunate to have two mentors for this project in the form of Edi Staniloiu and Razvan Nitu.
Create a CI or other infrastructure for measuring D’s progress and performance – Max Haughton, an 18-year-old British physics student, will be taking on the task of “creating a mechanism by which we can measure various properties of the D ecosystem in a deterministic manner”. This includes properties such as compilation time, compile-time memory usage, and profiling the compiler to determine “why performance is what it is”. He also intends to extend it to run-time performance by “forming a set of benchmarks by which we can profile Phobos and druntime both against their versions…and the version of the compiler”.
Solve Dependency Hell: link with more than one version of the same project – When a project has dependencies that in turn rely on different versions of the same library, steps must be taken to reconcile the version difference in order to successfully compile. If it’s even possible, it’s cumbersome and introduces new difficulties. Tiberiu Lepadatu aims to solve this problem of Dependency Hell by making it possible to compile a project with multiple versions of the same library. This is considered as a crucial first step in making Phobos available via the DUB registry. Tiberiu is no stranger to D and has contributed to the core projects in the past. He will likely be working with Sebastian Wilzbach as his mentor.

Getting Under Way

The SAOC participants will spend the next three weeks preparing to get their projects started. They’ll be compiling their Milestones, doing research, and those without a mentor will be searching for one. Things officially kick off on September 15, with Milestone deadlines falling on the 15th of each month through January.

This year, we’ll be expecting the participants to make weekly updates in the forums. We will also encourage them to spend time on IRC, Slack, or Discourse to get to know the community, discuss their projects, and find inspiration in solving the challenges they’ll face. We encourage all members of the D community to show their support and help keep up motivation.

Each of these projects will improve the D ecosystem.We’re fortunate to have this opportunity, along with out participation in the currently ongoing Google Summer of Code, to get so much done without the need to raise more money or dig into our Human Resource Fund. We should all be willing to do what we can to help these projects succeed.

On a personal level, I’m looking forward to working with these five programmers in the coming months and to seeing all of them make it through to the end of a successful Symmetry Autumn of Code!

Task Bounties Have Arrived

In 2013, Facebook launched a page for D bounties at BountySource. It saw a burst of excitement, a few bugs fixed, and then went quiet. By 2017, it had been “deemed unsuccessful”. In internal discussions on fundraising options and how to increase community participation in fixing bugs, the topic of bug bounties has often come up, but the failure of the BountySource page has led us to different alternatives and we’ve never tried to revive it. Last year, before we opened our OpenCollective page, we requested that BountySource refund all unpaid bounties and received confirmation that they had done so. Still, we’re always open to new approaches.

In June of this year, Mathias Lang, the CTO of BPF Korea (BOS Platform Foundation), signaled interest in offering bounties on a few issues and asked the D Language Foundation for suggestions on how to go about it. Given our increasing usage of Flipcause to handle our donations, and the benefits we get in terms of processing fees when more of our donation money is going through Flipcause, it was an easy decision to make. We could set up a menu with multiple campaigns, one for each bounty. Community members would be free to add to money to specific bounties, try their hand at fixing them, or request new bounties be added to the menu.

As of today, the D Task Bounties menu is live.

The Task Bounty System

There are several bounties available, some of which are tied to a Bugzilla issue. The remainder provide a description of the task and the conditions for receiving the bounty. Click a card on the menu to see the details, including the amount of the bounty. You can also increase the bounty of any of the issues by clicking on the card and submitting a donation.

There’s also a Task Bounty Catch-All campaign. This is where you can add to the bounties for multiple tasks with one credit card transaction; click the Catch-All card, enter the total amount you’d like to donate, and specify in a comment how the money is to be dispersed. You can also seed a new bounty through the Catch-All campaign; donate the amount you’d like to seed and either provide a Bugzilla issue number in the comment field or go to the menu at the top of the page, click Contact, and provide a detailed description of the issue and the conditions under which the bounty will be payable.

Bounties on any D ecosystem project are acceptable. Where possible, when seeding a new one, please try to connect it to a Bugzilla issue, a GitHub issue, or equivalent in the project’s issue tracker. We prefer bounties that are not tied to any issue to be the exception rather than the rule.

The conditions for payment of any bounty tied to a core DLang Bugzilla issue is always the same by default: the issue must be closed through a pull request being merged and subsequently shipped in a release of the affected program (dmd, dub, rdmd, etc..). Conditions may be altered by the person who seeds the bounty (e.g., if you decide to seed a bounty for a Bugzilla issue, you can request that payment be made when the PR is merged). Conditions for payment of bounties on issues for other projects must be stated in the description.

I want to reiterate: the conditions for payment of the bounty are entirely up to the person who seeds it, but they must be set when seeding the bounty (or left to the default in the case of Bugzilla issues).To receive a bounty, please email social@dlang.org when the conditions for payment have been met. You’ll need links to the pull request(s) and any other information we need to verify that you’re eligible. You’ll also need an account with a payment service of some kind (preferably Circle, TransferWise, or PayPal).

We’ll see how it goes and adapt with any rules or restrictions as needed. Our goal is to improve the D ecosystem for everyone, and if some folks can make a little money out of it in the process that’s even better. Ideas, suggestions, and feedback are always welcome.

Other News

I want to thank everyone who has donated $60.00 to the HR Fund in exchange for a DConf 2019 t-shirt. I’d also like to thank everyone who has donated directly to the HR Fund Campaign (for a DMan shirt or not). A big thanks especially to WekaIO, who have provided us with the lion’s share of the total. With the $360 we’ve raised with the DConf t-shirts, the fund is currently at $16,345. We still need to keep it growing, so don’t get complacent!

The application deadline for SAOC 2019 is tomorrow, midnight AoE. Don’t be late!

Finally, for those of you who would like to support the D Language Foundation through Amazon Smile but never remember to go to smile.amazon.com, there’s a browser plugin for that! You can get Smile Always for Chrome or Smart Amazon Smile for Firefox. That way, you can always be sure to support your selected charity with 0.5% of your purchase price when you shop at Amazon.

The DLang Swag Emporium (and more)!

It’s been quite a long time coming, but I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a storefront where folks can purchase D swag and support the D Language Foundation at the same time. You can now head over to the DLang Swag Emporium and throw some money at us.

At the moment, you can buy t-shirts, hoodies, and coffee cups sporting the Digital Mars logo and the D Rocket. If the prices appear arbitrary, they are not. They’re based on the cost of the item and the percentage that the Foundation takes in. I’ve set the percentages from 11.5% to 20%, depending on the base cost of the item, with the D Rocket items sending us more money than the Digital Mars logo. I’ll add more items in regular updates, so please keep an eye out for something you like if there’s nothing there for you now.

At some point, I’ll see about integrating the shop into dlang.org. Until then, the store page as it is will server its purpose just fine.

Please remember, we’ve also got DConf 2019 shirts available for anyone willing to donate $60 to our Human Resource Fund through this link. DMan shirts are available for those who can make a one-time donation of $100, or the shirt and a guaranteed DConf discount to those who can set up an annual donation of $200, through this link. The Human Resource Fund is our top fundraising priority right now. Please help us grow it!

As I mentioned in the forums recently, we’ll be setting up a bug bounty system through our Flipcause account Real Soon Now. This week I got an update from the company that’s seeding the system with a few issues. They’re getting their list and the dollar amounts finalized. But anyone who wants to get us started Even Sooner is welcome to contact me with a Bugzilla issue number and a dollar amount, then I’ll get it set up.

I hope to see some of those D Rocket and Digital Mars t-shirts at DConf 2020!

Get Ready for Symmetry Autumn of Code 2019

Last year, Symmetry Investments sponsored three programmers to work on projects in the D community. Two completed successfully. Francesco Gallà worked on adding support for HTTP/2 to vibe.d and got the grand prize of a bonus payment and a free trip to DConf 2019, where he gave a talk about the experience and his project. His compatriot, Franceso Mecca, worked on porting an old D1 forking GC to D2 for integration into DRuntime. He has a blog post drafted on that already that I will publish here as soon as he finishes the next round of work on the project and updates the draft with some new data.

Now, on behalf of the D Language Foundation and Symmetry Investments, I’m happy to announce that we are go for Symmetry Autumn of Code 2019! You’ll find the details on the SAoC page here at the blog.

This year it’s the same but different! It’s open once again to any programmer, with a preference for students. Participants will receive $1000 USD for each of three successful milestones for a total of $3000. One participant will be selected for a final $1000 payment and a free trip to DConf 2020.

Thanks to feedback from last year’s participants, we’ve made some adjustments this time around. The most visible is that we’re allowing more time to ramp up the projects. Officially, the project planning phase begins September 1, but realistically it begins a week earlier when the applicants are notified of their application status. The official launch of SAoC 2019 is on September 15, two weeks later than last year. We’ll also require participants to submit weekly status updates to the forums this year to encourage more interaction with the community.

Behind the scenes, we’ll be a little more hands on this year in the areas where it matters. The participants last year were happy that we weren’t looking over their shoulders, but there were areas where they would have found our intrusion be a boon. So this year, we’ll be taking a more active role in helping participants find mentors and ramp up their projects, and we’ll communicate more frequently with each student to determine any other specific support we can provide. We’ll stay out of their code and their workflow–that’s what mentors are for–but we’ll do what we can to help ensure a successful project for each participant.

We’re also doing something different for the mentors this year. The SAoC 2018 mentors received the gratitude of the participants and the organizers, and nothing else. Mentors in SAoC 2019 will get all that gratitude, but they’ll also each receive a one-time payment of $500 at the end of the event for a successful project. If, for whatever reason, a participant is unable to complete the event, the mentor may still be eligible for the payment, but it will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Following in the tradition of the Google Summer of Code events we’ve participated in over the years, we used a Wiki page for SAoC 2018 project ideas. This year, we’re using the new dlang/projects repository. Anyone with an idea for a SAoC project is welcome to submit an issue there. We’ll tag suitable projects with a SAOC tag so that SAoC 2019 applicants can easily search for projects that interest them. Please read the SAoC page for some guidelines on the sort of information a good project idea should contain.

We’re looking forward to seeing the applications this year. We’d like to expand the number of participants from last year’s three, but that depends on how many applications we get.

If you are interested in participating, please start thinking about your project ideas! The more detailed your application, the better the odds of being selected. We’ll get the tags going on dlang/projects soon to help get the gears cranking.

For the rest of you, please submit project ideas or consider being a mentor. Potential mentors should either contact me directly or announce their interest in the forums. Applicants in search of a mentor can do the same. The details are on the SAoC 2019 page.

Good luck!