Category Archives: Donations

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.

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!

D Language Foundation Funding: New Platforms, New Bounties

Digital Mars logoWhen 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.

Donate to the campaign for adding iOS/iPadOS support to LDC.

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.

DMD 2.088.0 Released

Digital Mars logoThe newest DMD has rolled off the assembly line and is ready for download. A total of 58 contributors fixed 58 bugs and introduced 27 major changes to version 2.088.0 of the compiler.

I’m always looking for the big ticket items in a new DMD release to highlight on the blog, but this is a workaday release that isn’t showing off anything too shiny in the changleog. Much of it is run-of-the mill maintenance: deprecations, removals, and behavior adjustments. All of that is important, and we all welcome it, but it doesn’t make for great reading on the blog. That said, there are a handful of useful additions that I can point to, one of which actually is a big deal when it comes to C++ interop.

std::string and std::vector

Thanks to the work Manu Evans has been performing and advocating, C++ interoperability gets a big boost in this release with bindings to std::string and std::vector in the DRuntime modules core.stdcpp.string and core.stdcpp.vector, respectively.  There’s one caveat with the std::string binding that anyone intending to use it must be aware of.

When compiling on Linux, where DMD makes use of the GCC libraries and linker, there’s a compatibility issue when using the modern version of std::string which is compliant with C++11. It contains an interior pointer, which in D is both illegal and incompatible with move semantics. The work around is to pass -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 to g++ and compile your D application with -version=_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX98_ABI. This will be resolved in the future when work on move constructors in D is complete.

New Utilities

The language gets an interesting new compile-time trait in the form of getLocation. Given a symbol, this trait will return a tuple containing the file name, line number, and column number at which the symbol appears in the source code. This opens the door to more informative debug logging and error reporting beyond the functionality already available via __FILE__ and __LINE__. And I’m sure folks will find other uses for it.

The standard library utility module std.file, which provides a lot of convenience functions for working with files as a unit, now has the new function getAvailableDiskSpace. Give it a directory path on Windows, or the path to a directory or file on Posix, and it will give you the number of bytes available on that path.

Other News

The Symmetry Autumn of Code 2019 participants all have mentors now and they are hard at work laying out their milestones. Milestone 1 officially kicks off on September 15, after which we can expect to see weekly updates from the participants in the General forum.

Google Summer of Code 2019 has come to an end. Five of our students submitted their work at the end of August. You can find information about their projects and view their code submissions from our GSOC projects page. Congratulations to all who participated!

The D Language Foundation is currently in discussions to put some of the Human Resource Fund to use in finalizing LDC support for iOS and Android. Hopefully, I’ll have details to report on that front in the very near future. In the meantime, please help us raise the HR Fund even higher than it is now. There’s some important work waiting to be done that will require as much money as we can throw at it. You can donate any amount directly to the HR Fund Campaign or use the special campaign we set up to send $60 to the HR Fund and get a DConf 2019 t-shirt in return.

Speaking of t-shirts, thanks to everyone who has made a purchase in our DLang Swag Emporium. You’ve helped us raise over $77 so far, all of which will go to the General Fund. If you haven’t yet dropped in, what are you waiting for? We’ve got t-shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs, with updates coming soon. It’s an easy way to support our favorite programming language!

 

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!

DMD 2.087.0 Released

Digital Mars logoThe latest release of the Digital Mars D compiler (DMD) is now available. Version 2.087.0 marks 44 closed Bugzilla issues and 22 major changes courtesy of 63 contributors. See the changelog for the details and related links. Visit the Digital Mars Downloads page to get the release package for your platform(s).

One of the changes in this release is the end of a transitional period regarding imports, another involves a certain compiler switch and the compilation of Phobos. There’s also something developers on Windows will find useful, and more options for documenting code with Ddoc.

Endings and beginnings

Once upon a time, two related compiler issues were reported in the D bug tracker, where they remained for years beyond measure (it was actually just shy of a decade). These bugs allowed symbols to sometimes be accessed inside a scope in which they weren’t supposed to be visible. Eventually, once the bugs were fixed, two switches were introduced to help users maintain their existing code: -transtion=import caused the code to compile under the old, incorrect behavior, and -transition=checkimport would report on all occurences of the erroneous behavior in a code base. Steven Schveighoffer did a write up about it all on his blog at the time, which is a good read for anyone interested in the details.

In DMD 2.087.0, the transitional period is over. The -transition=import and -transition=checkimports switches no longer have any effect. Henceforth, if you have any existing code you’ve been compiling with -transition=import, your code will break with the new release if you are still relying on the old buggy behavior.

As one period ends, another begins. A new deprecation will give you warnings if you are initializing immutable global data via a static constructor like so:

immutable int bar;
static this()
{
    bar = 42;
}

This behavior is deprecated. Static constructors and destructors are called once per thread. Given that immutable global data is implicitly shared across threads rather than being thread-local like normal D variables, data like bar would be overwritten every time a new thread is spawned. The fix is to ensure that the static constructor is also shared across threads:

immutable int bar;
shared static this()
{
    bar = 42;
}

Static constructors and destructors marked shared are invoked once per process rather than once per thread.

DIP 1000 and Phobos

DIP 1000 was the first D Improvement Proposal submitted after the DIP process was transformed from an informal, wiki-based approach, to a formal, managed approach with structured review periods. It proposed a feature called “Scoped Pointers” intended to “provide a mechanism to guarantee that a reference cannot escape lexical scope”. Unfortunately, the document itself remained in a sort of limbo as the proposed feature was implemented and evolved. Eventually, the implementation diverged from the proposal to such a degree that the DIP was marked as Superseded and retired. But not the feature!

The -preview=dip1000 flag has been available for some time now, but it has been a bit tricky to use given that the standard library could not be compiled with it. With DMD 2.087.0, that is true no more. Phobos now compiles with -preview=dip1000 and D programmers can now more easily make use of the feature.

Given that this is still in preview mode and hasn’t yet seen enough wide-spread use, please don’t be surprised if you uncover any bugs. Please do report any bugs you find to the issue tracker so that they can be squashed as soon as possible.

Explicitly choose the LLD linker on Windows

From the beginning, DMD shipped with self-contained support for 32-bit development on Windows. This was possible because Walter Bright made use of the existing platform libraries and linker (OPTLINK) that he was already shipping with his Digital Mars C and C++ compiler. Unfortunately, OPTLINK only supports the OMF object format, so the output of DMD on Windows was incompatible with the greater Windows ecosystem which is primarily built around the PE COFF output (see this PDF of the specification) of the Microsoft build tools. PE COFF, known as MSCOFF in the D universe, is a Microsoft-specific version of the COFF format.

Eventually, Walter added MSCOFF support to DMD for 64-bit (and later, 32-bit) development, but that required that developers have the Microsoft linker and platform libraries installed. In the past, that meant installing either Visual Studio or the Microsoft Build Tools package along with the Windows SDK. In recent years, installing Visual Studio Community edition would provide everything necessary. When compiling with -m64 or -m32mscoff, OPTLINK would be ignored in favor of the Microsoft linker.

With the release of DMD 2.079.0, the compiler began shipping with the LLVM linker (LLD), a set of platform libraries derived from those that ship with the MinGW compiler, and a wrapper library for the Visual C++ 2010 runtime. From that point forward, when given -m64 or -m32mscoff on Windows, the compiler would search for the Microsoft installation and, if not found, fallback on the bundled linker and libraries if they were installed. For the first time, DMD had self-contained 64-bit output on Windows. (Interestingly, it’s never been self-contained on other platforms, where DMD relies on the system linker and libraries, the presence of which is a given and not a source of complaint as the dependence on the MS linker has been.)

Now that the new set up has been put through its paces for a while and some of the kinks have been ironed out, DMD 2.087.0 makes it possible to explicitly select the bundled MSCOFF import libraries and LLD linker via the command line switch -mscrtlib=msvcrt100.

Markdown support in Ddoc

Ddoc was originally designed as a macro-based system for documenting source code, but its use has expanded beyond that scenario in the years since. Most sections of the dlang.org website are created with Ddoc, as is the dconf.org site. Ali Çehreli used it to write his book, Programming in D.

Support for Markdown-like syntax has been requested now and again in the forums. Now that’s available in DMD 2.087. It’s currently in preview mode, so it requires the -preview=markdown flag. There are some differences from the other flavors of Markdown you may be familiar with, so be sure to read the list of supported features before putting it to use.

Supporting the development of D

Much of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into this and every release of the compiler was provided by volunteers. They do the work they can within the constraints of their knowledge, skills, experience and, the mother of all limiters, time. There are some tasks that have yet to fit within the bounds of any volunteer’s constraints. These will require dedicated effort to strike off the list.

To that end, I’d like to remind everyone that we are raising money for a Human Resource Fund that we will use to bring in some folks specifically to tackle these difficult tasks. WekaIO seeded the fund with a generous contribution and a few of our community members have thrown some of their own resources into the pot with the gratitude of the D Language Foundation.

But we need more! We still have DConf 2019 t-shirts for anyone who wants to throw $60 at the HR fund, as well as DMan shirts and DConf 2020 registration discounts for those able and willing to donate more. See my recent blog post on the topic for details to make sure you donate to the correct campaign in order to get the shirt you want.

Another reminder: if you want to become a Gold Donor or Personal Sponsor on our Open Collective page (which is separate from the HR Fund – again, read my recent blog post to avoid confusion), please either ensure your email address is included in your profile or contact me directly to let me know who you are. Otherwise, I can’t send you a DMan shirt!

DConf T-Shirts and the Human Resource Fund

I announced the Human Resource Fund back in April as part of an initiative we’re working on with companies using D in production. It was seeded by WekaIO. Now we need to see it grow.

We always have an excess of t-shirts after DConf. Often, they are given away. This year, we intentionally ordered many more than necessary. Some were given away to “Friends of D” (such as the venue staff), but the rest were intended to help us raise money.

Some of the shirts remained in London. The remainder were given to several volunteers to carry with them back home, the goal being to position them around the world so that we can minimize shipping costs. Now, we’re ready to start sending the shirts through the mail.

Help us by donating $60 to the Human Resource Fund and one of our volunteers will send you a DConf 2019 t-shirt. To take advantage of this, you have to donate through the following campaign:

Donate and get a DConf 2019 t-shirt!

The D Language Foundation will reimburse each volunteer for the shipping costs. In order to help us minimize those costs and maximize the amount we get to keep, we’ve set up a menu organized by shirt size and region, as shown in the following screenshot.

Screenshot of donation form.This campaign will help us minimize shipping costs and keep track in real time of the number of shirts remaining. Once the shirts are gone, the campaign is closed. So please, when you make your donation, help us out by selecting the region in which you live if there are still shirts available.

Those of you who have seen our Open Collective page may be aware that Gold Donors, those who make a one-time donation of $100 or more, receive a DMan t-shirt. Personal Sponsors, those who commit to an annually recurring donation of $200 or more, receive a DMan t-shirt and a guaranteed Early-Bird discount to the next DConf. We’re extending both of those packages to the Human Resource Fund campaign.

To take advantage of this, please donate through the HR Fund campaign page:

Donate to the Human Resource Fund.

After I receive notification from Flipcause of your donation, I’ll contact you to verify your shipping address and determine the size and color you’d prefer for your new DMan t-shirt.

Dman t-shirts.

Please help us grow this fund! The General Fund is also important and we still welcome donations there, but the Human Resource Fund will be our primary focus for the next few months. The sooner we reach the levels we need, the sooner we can hire people to work on important and difficult tasks in the D ecosystem.

Human Resources in the D Ecosystem (or Resources, Resources, Resources)

In November of last year, I announced here that we were launching a Pull Request Manager campaign. We wanted to raise $3000 in three months as compensation for Nicholas Wilson to make a dent in the pull request queues of the core D projects. The community answered the call and Nicholas got to work. It was a successful run, so we decided to go another round.

About a month remains in the second round campaign, but donations have come in at a slower pace. Still, we’re confident the community will once again help us reach the finish line so we can compensate Nicholas for his time. We intend to launch a third round at some point in the not-too-distant future, but before we do that we’ve got some different fish to fry.

The Human Resource Share

In December 2018, the first Quarterly D Language Foundation meeting was held online. It came together at the prodding of the aforementioned Nicholas Wilson. Some well-known D shops—Dunhumby (Sociomantic), Funkwerk, WekaIO, and Symmetry Investments—were invited to send representatives to join Walter, Andrei, Ali Çehreli, Nicholas, and myself in a Skype call. Given that it was the inaugural meeting, the agenda was light. We primarily wanted to hear what the companies’ biggest D issues were at the time so that we could prioritize them in the work pipeline. However, we did raise one idea that we wanted the companies to consider for our benefit.

A persistent problem in the D ecosystem is a lack of available human resources to work on the issues that don’t fall into the realm of personal or corporate interests. By that I mean that volunteers tend to contribute where they have a personal interest and contributions from the companies tend to be aimed almost exclusively at areas that have a direct benefit to their projects. The result is that a large number of issues that do not fit into either category fall by the wayside. This is only to be expected and we aren’t complaining. What we are doing is trying to determine how to direct energy toward those neglected issues without the need for raising money.

So we asked the companies to consider a form of “human resource sharing”, the idea being that each company would periodically designate one employee to spend a day on the company dime working on D ecosystem tasks that don’t necessarily have a direct impact on the company’s interests. The representatives promised to take it back to their bosses and give us an answer at the next meeting.

In the interim, I wrote up a more concrete proposal that outlined two options for approaching it: a monthly rotation where each company takes turns doing the work, and a quarterly system where each company commits to completing at least one item on the task list per quarter. I asked the companies to provide us with their preference at our second quarterly meeting in March.

At the March meeting, we invited a few more companies to join us. Given that these are either in the startup phase or aren’t using D exclusively, I’ll play it safe and keep quiet about who they are for now. Overall, the response to the Human Resource Share was positive. Unfortunately, most of the companies are already short on human resources as it is and cannot commit to our quarterly scheme. However, one company did commit to starting immediately and another committed to providing work as they can. All of them committed to helping in other ways, which includes the provision of funds (see below), and hope to have the human resources to spare in the future.

To that end, we’ve set up the ecotasks repository to house our Ecosystem Task List. The list was initially envisioned as a collection of specific tasks, e.g. specific Bugzilla issues, but that makes it more difficult for each tasked worker to decide what to do. Instead, we’ve cobbled together a set of task groups. For now, that consists primarily of links to the GitHub Issues page for different projects and a request to “close as many issues as possible”. The idea is that workers can go to an issues page and work on solving those they can squeeze into their allotted time.

We’ve put this on GitHub not just as a means of transparency, but also because we would like to invite the entire community to participate. The list is loosely sorted by priority in that items higher on the list are considered higher priority than those lower on the list, but there’s no relative priority between specific tasks. The ordering is sure to change over time.

We ask that anyone working through the list to, at the start of the work session, open an issue and leave a comment indicating which item is being worked on. For example:

I’m working on the dub registry issues right now. Specifically, I plan to tackle issues #I, #J, and #K.

Then, at the end of the work session, close the issue with a note indicating what was accomplished.

If you have a little time to spare one weekend, please consider visiting the ecotasks repository and taking on one or two issues. Even better, challenge yourself to go through it once a month and see what you can accomplish. D depends on volunteer effort to thrive. We have a lot of it already, but we always need more. This is one of many ways to make an impact even if it isn’t an enjoyable or very visible one.

The Human Resource Fund

There are some tasks in the D ecosystem that no amount of cajoling and begging will get done because they’re too complex, too time consuming, require a specific skill set to properly complete, or all of the above. When the companies offered to throw money at us in place of human resources, that led us to a new idea.

We are now running a permanent fundraising campaign specifically aimed at solving the bigger issues. The Human Resource Fund for D Ecosystem Tasks is intended to grow and grow and grow. We’re currently in talks with some of the companies about how often and how much they can contribute toward it and in what amounts. We also invite the community at large to donate to it now and again.

Recently, Andrei mentioned in the forums that we need to put together a qualified team to complete the spec and implementation of shared. That’s an example of the sort of big issue we want to use this fund to solve. Donations small and large are equally welcome. The sooner we can get a nice pile built up, the sooner we can start prioritizing issues and finding the people to solve them.

For now, we want to focus on beefing this fund up a bit so we’re going to hold off temporarily on the next Pull Request Manager campaign, but we’ll definitely come back to that again before too long. Anyway, the current campaign is still in need of your attention!

Effecting Change

Every D user has different priorities and goals, different needs and desires. A full-featured IDE is important to one person but not even worth mentioning for another. One programmer expects to see a native D GUI, another is happy with bindings to an existing C or C++ library, and yet another has no need of a GUI at all. One person contributes to a certain D project, but never to any others, while another person has a different set they contribute to, or starts their own. Somewhere in the middle are the issues that are too boring or too complex, the issues that never rise to anyone’s attention or are considered undoable for whatever reason.

In the time I’ve been following and involved with D, I’ve seen the leadership try a number of different ways to drive energy toward some of these unsolved issues. What every approach they’ve tried has had in common is that they depend on the community. When you don’t have the human resources to do the job, you need the money to hire the human resources. When you don’t have the money, you need to ask for and rely upon the charity and goodwill of others. And if there’s no one with the bandwidth to continuously push the issue, fewer people step up. When the community doesn’t step up, then either someone on the core team has to (at the expense of time taken from their normal workload) or the issue languishes.

The two initiatives I’ve described above, the Human Resource Share and the Human Resource Fund, are the latest attempts to make things happen. Again, all contributions are welcome and appreciated! I don’t want this to come off as a complaint, because that’s not what is intended at all.

This is a call to arms! We’re asking members of the community to roll up their sleeves and do the dirty work they normally wouldn’t think to do, or even would prefer not to do. We’re asking for crowdsourced effort in solving problems that will make the D ecosystem better for all of us. A few dozen people spending an hour here or a weekend there will mean more issues closed and more members of the core team can stay focused more often on the work in their purview, which is another big win.

If you can’t help us out with your time, help us out with your money! The Human Resource fund will always need boosting. So, too, the General Fund, the current PR Manager campaign, and any other campaigns we launch in the future. You can also support us when you shop at Amazon by doing so via smile.amazon.com and selecting “D Language Foundation” as your supported charity. When you buy products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” through smile.amazon.com, the foundation will receive 0.5% of the purchase price. Finally, you’ll soon be able to support D through the DLang Swag Emporium, where you’ll be able to purchase D-themed t-shirts, coffee mugs, and more.

We’re always open to ideas on how to get more things done. If you have anything you’d like to suggest, bring it to the forums for community discussion or email me directly at aldacron@gmail.com.

Now, let’s make things happen!

DConf 2019 Early-Bird Registration Opens (and Other News)

I’ve got a few big news items for you today, the biggest being one I’ve been eagerly awaiting: early-bird registration for DConf 2019 London is now open!

Early-bird Registrations…

…are now open!

We’re very fortunate, thanks to the generosity of Symmetry Investments, to be able to keep the normal registration fee to our standard $400 this year. Like last year, the early-bird discount is once again 15%, so register before March 17, 24:00 AOE, and you’ll only pay $340. Unfortunately, unlike past editions of DConf, we’re required to charge a VAT of 20% this year, so the early-bird rate with tax is $408 and the regular registration will be $480 with tax. The GBP value of the VAT is listed alongside the price on the registration page and will be updated when the average monthly exchange rate changes.

Currently, you’ll find two options for payment on the registration page: Flipcause and PayPal. Those of you who have been following the latest goings on will know that we’re using Flipcause to create donation campaigns. They also provide support to configure campaigns for events like DConf, allowing us to keep as much as possible coming into one place. In the long run, this will be more efficient for us than accepting money through other services, so if you aren’t paying with a PayPal balance for your DConf registration, we ask that you please choose the Flipcause option.

You’ll also find the DConf campaign listed in our Campaign Menu, which is accessible from the big Donate Now button in this blog’s sidebar as well as from the D Language Foundation’s donation page. In the past, we have supported Eventbrite as a payment option, but have not yet decided if we will do so this year.

Invited Keynote Speaker

I’m also happy to announce that Laeeth Isharc has accepted our invitation to be a keynote speaker at DConf 2019.

Every year, Walter and Andrei are joined by an invited keynote speaker to open each of the three presentation days of the conference. Sometimes, the speaker is from outside of the D community for a different perspective (Scott Meyers was the invited keynote speaker at DConfs 2014 and 2017, and Martin Odersky was the invited keynote speaker last year). This year, offering the invitation to Laeeth was a no-brainer.

Not only is Laeeth responsible for bringing DConf 2019 to London under the sponsorship of Symmetry Investments, he’s also an enthusiastic supporter of the D programming language. He hires D programmers, sponsors open-source D projects, initiated the Symmetry Autumn of Code (SAoC), and can be found in various forums around the internet answering questions about D. Despite all of that, he’s never spoken at a DConf. We can’t wait to hear what he has to say!

The SAoC Finalist

Three programmers started the Symmetry Autumn of Code. Each participant was to complete three milestones, each of one-month duration, and would receive $1000 upon the successful completion of each. After a final month of clean-up work (whatever was required by each project), one participant was to be selected for a final $1000 payment and a free pass to DConf 2019, including travel and lodging.

One participant was unable to continue after the first milestone. The other two—Francesco Mecca, whose project was porting Leandro Lucarella’s old D1 forking GC to DRuntime, and Francesco Galla, whose project was adding HTTP/2 support to vibe-http—were able to see the event through to the end. Both did some excellent work on their chosen projects, but only one would be selected for the final prize.

I can now announce that congratulations are in order for Francesco Galla! He’ll be receiving the final payment and the trip to DConf 2019. As it turns out, he and the other Francesco happen to be friends. They had an agreement beforehand that the finalist would use the extra $1000 to pay for the other to attend DConf. And we’ve been informed that we’ll be fortunate enough to meet both of them in London!

We’ll also be hearing from Francesco Mecca before then, as he has agreed to write about his project for this blog. Francesco Galla will either write a blog post or, depending on how the conference schedule comes together, give a presentation about his project at DConf (possibly both!). Keep an ear open for the announcements.

The New Fundraiser

The PR Manager Campaign was a tremendous success. Not only did we meet our goal well before the deadline, but Nicholas Wilson has done a great job cleaning up the pull request queues. We will continue that campaign for another quarter, starting next month.

In the meantime, we’re raising $2000 for a new server for the D Forums. There are two reasons we’ve selected this as our next target.

First, Vladimir Panteleev has been paying for the server for the D Forums (and his other D services) out of his pocket for years. It’s time we put a stop to that. The forums are a crucial part of the D programming language community and it shouldn’t be up to one person to pay the bills.

Second, the forums have been experiencing performance issues at an increasing frequency over the past several months. Among the possible solutions that Vladimir has identified to improve this state of things, moving to better hardware is a big one. If ever there was a time for the community to take over the server bills, it’s now.

So we encourage you to donate to the cause! Helping us meet our $2000 goal will cover a new server for the forums and provide a cushion for any incidental expenses. Vladimir has graciously declined to accept any money from the D Language Foundation for the work he does in actually maintaining and improving the forums, so we’d like to draw your attention to his Patreon account, where you can more broadly support the open-source work he does.

We thank Vladimir for all the time and money he’s put into this over the years, and thank you in advance for your donations!

Updates in D Land

As we encroach upon the end of 2018, a recent Reddit thread wishing D a happy 17th birthday reminded me how far the language has come since I first stumbled upon it in 2003. Many of the steps along the way were powered by the energy of users who had little incentive to contribute beyond personal interest. And here we are, all these years later, still moving forward.

There are a number of current and upcoming happenings that will play a role in keeping that progress going. In this post, I’d like to remind you, update you, or inform you about some of them.

The Pull Request Manager Campaign

If you haven’t heard, the D Language Foundation has hired a pull request manager, to be paid out of a pool of donations. This is our first major fundraising campaign through Flipcause. I’m happy to report that it’s going well. As I write, we’ve raised $1,864 of our $3,000 target in 66 days thanks to the kindness of 30 supporters. If you’d like to support us in this cause, click on the campaign card.

You can access our full campaign menu at any time via the “Donate Now” button in the sidebar here on the blog. A pull request has also been submitted to integrate the menu into dlang.org’s donation page. Currently, we only have two campaigns (this one and the General Fund) but any future campaigns will be accessible through those menus.

Symmetry Autumn of Code

Earlier this year, Symmetry Investments partnered with the D Language Foundation to sponsor the Symmetry Autumn of Code (SAoC). Three participants were selected to work on D-related projects over the course of four months, with milestones to mark their progress. If you haven’t heard of it or had forgotten, you can read the details on the SAoC page here at the blog.

Unfortunately, one participant was unable to continue after the first milestone. The other two, whom we have come to refer to as the two Francescos, have each successfully completed three milestones and are in the home stretch, aiming for that final payment and free trip to DConf 2019.

Francesco Mecca is working on porting an old D1 GC to modern D, and Francesco Galla’ is busy adding HTTP/2 support the vibe-http library. Both have made significant progress and are on track to a successful SAoC. Read more about their projects in my previous SAoC update.

DIP Updates

I’ve received partial feedback on a decision regarding DIP 1013 (The Deprecation Process) and expect to hear the final verdict soon. As soon as I do, I’ll move Manu’s DIP 1016 (ref T accepts r-values) into the Formal Assessment stage for Walter and Andrei to consider.

I had intended to move Razvan’s Copy Constructor DIP into Community Review by now, as that is a high priority for Walter and Andrei. However, he’s been working out some more details so it’s not quite yet ready. So as not to hold up the process any longer, I’ll be starting Community Review for one of the other DIPs in the PR queue at the end of this week. When the Copy Constructor DIP is ready, I’ll run its review in parallel.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019

At the end of last month, I announced in the forums that we’re ramping up for GSoC 2019. I seeded our Wiki page with two potential project ideas to get us started. So far, only one additional idea has been added and no one has contacted me about participating as a student or a mentor.

It’s been a while since we were last accepted into GSoC and we’d very much like to get into it this time. To do so, we need more project ideas, students to execute them, and mentors to provide guidance to the students. If you’re looking for another way to contribute to the D community, this is a great way to do so. Adding project ideas costs little beyond the time it takes to add the details to the Wiki and, if you are lacking in ideas already dying to escape the confines of your neurocranium, the time it takes to brainstorm something. Student and mentor participation is a more significant commitment, but it’s also a lot more rewarding. If you’re interested, tell me at aldacron@gmail.com.

DConf 2019

Finally, I’m happy to announce… Just kidding. I can’t announce anything yet about DConf 2019, but I hope to be able to soon. What I can say with certainty is that in 2019, DConf will be where DConf has never gone before. We’re currently working out some details with an eye toward making 2019 a big year for DConf.

I’m really excited about it and eager to let everyone know. I’ll do so as soon as I’m able. Watch this space!