Category Archives: SAoC

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

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The first three months of 2022 brought some major milestones:

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

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

And now on with the news.

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

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

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

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

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

The New Pull Request and Issue Manager

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

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

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

Tell them about it–#dbugfix

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

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

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

D 2.099.0

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

Import modules in C source code with ImportC

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

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

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

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

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

Compile with:

dmd dhelloimport.c dsayhello.d

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

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

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

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

Compile with:

dmd chelloimport.c csayhello.c

The throw expression has been implemented

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

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

And required this form instead:

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

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

void foo(int function() f) {}

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

PE/COFF is the default DMD output on Windows

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

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

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

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

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

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

LDC

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

DConf ’22 in London

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

Guest keynote speaker

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

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

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

Registration

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

Talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venue

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

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

BeerConf!

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

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

We can’t wait to see you in London!

New Year DLang News: Hello 2022

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

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

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

Now for some updates to lead us into 2022.

We’re hiring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symmetry Investments is hiring

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

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

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

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

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

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

DConf Online 2021 Q & A videos

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

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

Onward and upward!

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year!

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

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

Read on for the deets.

DMD 2.098.0

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

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

ImportC

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

Fork-based garbage collector

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

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

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

See the D documentation for more GC configuration options.

Shrinking the pull-request queues

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

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

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

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

LDC 1.28.0

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

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

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

D on OpenBSD

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

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

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

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

SAOC News

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

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

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

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

DConf Online 2021 T-Shirts

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

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

Looking Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAOC 2021 Projects

Digital Mars D logo

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

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

Rethinking the default class hierarchy

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

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

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

Welcome back, Robert!

Replace DRuntime hooks with templates

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

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

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

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

Implement support for D in LLVM Debugger (LLDB)

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

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

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

Light Weight DRuntime (LWDR)

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

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

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

His mentor for SAOC 2021 is Adam D. Ruppe.

Improve DUB: solve dependency hell

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

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

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

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

Onward!

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

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

D News Roundup

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

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2021

Symmetry Investments logo

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

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

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

DConf Online 2021

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

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

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

New compiler releases

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

DMD 2.097.0

Digital Mars D logo

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

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

LDC 1.27.0-beta1

LDC logo

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

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

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

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

GDC 11.1

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

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

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

One-off donations

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

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

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

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2020 Projects and Participants

Symmetry Investments logoThe verdict is in! Five programmers will be participating in the 2020 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code. Over the next three weeks, they will be working with their mentors to take the goals they outlined in their applications and turn them into concrete tasks across four milestones. Then, on September 15th, the first milestone gets under way.

Throughout the event, anyone can follow the progress of each project through the participants’ weekly updates in the General forum. Please don’t ignore those posts! You might be able to offer suggestions to help them along the way.

And now a little about the SAOC 2020 participants and their projects.

  • Robert Aron is a fourth-year Computer Science student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. For his project, he’ll be implementing D client libraries for the Google APIs. When it’s complete, we’ll be able to interact with Google service APIs, such as GDrive, Calendar, Search, and GMail, directly from D. The goal is to complete the project by the end of the event.
  • Michael Boston is currently developing a game in D. For his SAOC project, he’ll be taking some custom data structures he’s developed and adapting them to be more generic. The ultimate goal is to get Michael’s modified implementation merged into Phobos. Should that not happen, the library will still be part of the D ecosystem once it’s complete.
  • Mihaela Chirea is a fourth-year Computer Engineering student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. Mihaela will spend SAOC 2020 improving DMD as a library. Part of this project will involve soliciting community feedback regarding proposed changes, so anyone interested in using DMD as a library should keep an eye out for Mihaela’s posts in the D forums.
  • Teona Severin is a first-year master’s degree student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest who will be working on a mini DRuntime in order to bring D to low-performance microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M CPUs. Currently, D can run on such systems when compiled as -betterC, but the end goal of this project is to get enough of a functional DRuntime to write “a simple application that actively uses a class.“
  • Adela Vais is yet another fourth-year Computer Engineering student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. For her project, she’ll be implementing a new D backend for GNU Bison. Currently, Bison has an experimental LALR1 parser for D. Adela’s implementation will be a GLR parser intended to overcome the limitations of the LALR1 parser.

The strong showing from Bucharest is down to the work of Razvan Nitzu and Eduard Staniloiu. They have introduced a number of students to the D programming language and encouraged them in seeking out projects beneficial both to their education and to the D community. Plus, Razvan and Edi will be participating in SAOC 2020 as mentors.

On behalf of the SAOC 2020 committee, the D Language Foundation, and Symmetry Investments, I want to thank everyone who submitted an application and wish the participants the best of luck in the coming months.

Deadlines and New Swag

SAOC 2020 Application Deadline

Symmetry Investments logoThe deadline for Symmetry Autumn of Code (SAOC) 2020 applications is on August 16th. There’s work to be done and money to be paid (courtesy of Symmetry Investments). If you know of a project that can keep an eager programmer busy for at least 20 hours a week over the course of four months, please advertise it in the forums and add it to the project ideas list if it isn’t already there.

As for potential applicants, remember that experience with D is not necessary. Experience with another language can be transferred to D “on the job”, with a mentor to guide the way. Tell your friends and spread the word to other programming communities. This is a great way to bring new faces to the D community and the new ideas they may bring with them. All the information on how to apply and how to become a mentor is available on the SAOC 2020 page.

DConf Online 2020 Swag

DConf Online 2020 Logo

The DConf Online 2020 submission deadline of August 31 will be here before we know it. If you haven’t put a submission together yet, head over to the DConf Online 2020 home page (and/or the announcement here on the blog) for the details on what we’re looking for and how to go about it. Everyone whose submission is accepted for the event schedule will receive a t-shirt and coffee mug to commemorate the occasion.

For everyone else, those t-shirts and mugs are on sale now at the DLang Swag Emporium along with tote bags and stickers. Remember, all of the money we raise through the store goes straight into the General Fund, which we’ll dip into to provide DConf Online 2020 speakers with their free stuff and a few lucky viewers with prizes. Donations made directly to the General Fund, or to any of our ongoing campaigns, are also greatly appreciated.

DConf Online 2020: Call For Submissions

DConf Online 2020 LogoDConf Online 2020 is happening November 21 & 22, 2020 in your local web browser! We are currently taking submissions for pre-recorded talks, livstreamed panels, and livecoding events. See the DConf Online 2020 web site for details on how you can participate. Keep reading here for more info on how it came together and what we hope to achieve, as well as for a reminder about the 2020 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code (the SAOC 2020 registration deadline is just over three weeks away!).

Maybe Next Time, London!

Due to the onset of COVID-19, the D Language Foundation and Symmetry Investments decided in early March to cancel DConf 2020, which had been scheduled to take place June 17–20 in London. DConf has been the premiere D programming language event every year since 2013, the one chance for members of the D community from around the world to gather face-to-face outside of their local meetups for four days of knowledge sharing and comradery. It was a painful decision, but the right one. As of now, we can’t say for sure there will be a DConf 2021, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely.

Immediately upon reaching the decision to cancel DConf, the obvious question arose of whether we should take the conference online. It was something none of the DConf organizers had any experience with, so we were unwilling to commit to anything until we could figure out a way to go about it that makes sense for our community. As time progressed and we explored our options, the idea became more attractive. Finally, we settled on an approach that we think will work for our community while still allowing outsiders to easily drop by to get a look at our favorite programming language.

We also decided that this is not going to be an online substitute for the real-world DConf. That’s why we’ve named it DConf Online 2020 and not DConf 2020 Online. We’re planning to make this an annual event. The real-world DConf will still take place in spring or summer (barring pandemics or other unforeseen circumstances), and DConf Online six months or so later. Without the DConf cancellation, we never would have reached this point, so for us that’s a bit of a bright side to these dark days.

DConf on YouTube

DConf Online will take place on the D Language Foundation’s YouTube Channel. The event will kick off with a pre-recorded keynote from Walter Bright, the creator and co-maintainer of D, on November 21, scheduled to premiere at a yet-to-be-determined time. Other pre-recorded talks will be scheduled to premiere throughout the weekend, including a Day Two keynote on November 22 from co-maintainer Átila Neves. Presenters from the pre-recorded talks will be available for livestreamed question and answer sessions just as they would be in the real-world DConf.

We’ll also be livestreaming an Ask Us Anything session, a DConf tradition, with Walter and Átila. We’re looking for other ideas for livestream panels. Anyone submitting a panel proposal should either be willing to moderate the panel or have already found someone to commit to the position.

And we really, really want to have at least two livecoding sessions. Anyone familiar with D who has experience livecoding is welcome to submit a proposal. Ideally, we’re looking for sessions that present a solid demonstration of D in use, preferably a small project designed exclusively for the livestream, something that can be developed from start to finish in no more than 90 minutes. We aren’t looking for tutorial style sessions that go into great detail on a feature or two (though that sort of thing is great for a pre-recorded talk submission!), but something that shows how a D program comes together and what D features look like in action.

Everything you need to know to submit a pre-recorded talk, panel, or livecoding session to the D Language Foundation can be found at the DConf Online 2020 web site. We’ll have more details here and on the web site in the coming weeks as our plans solidify. Oh, and everyone whose submission is accepted will receive some swag from the DLang Swag Emporium (DConf Online 2020 swag is coming soon).

BeerConf

It’s a DConf tradition that a gathering spot is selected where attendees can get together each evening for drinks, food, and conversation. For many attendees, this is a highlight of the conference. The opportunity to engage in conversation with so many smart, like-minded people is not one to be missed. Ethan Watson dubbed these evening soirees “BeerConf”, and the name has stuck.

Recently, Ethan and other D community members have been gathering for a monthly online #BeerConf. Given that it’s such an integral part of the DConf experience, we hope to make use of the lessons they’re learning to run a BeerConf in parallel to DConf Online, starting on the 20th. Despite the name, no one will be expected to drink alcohol of any kind. It’s all about getting together to socialize as close to face-to-face as we can get online.

More details regarding BeerConf will be announced closer to the conference dates, so keep an eye on the blog!

SAOC 2020

Symmetry Autumn of Code is an annual event where a handful of lucky programmers get paid to write some D code. Sponsored by Symmetry Investments, SAOC 2020 is the third edition of the event. Although priority is given to university students, SAOC is open to anyone over 18.

Applicants send a project proposal and a short bio to the D Language Foundation. Those who are selected will be required to work on their project at least 20 hours per week from September 15, 2020, until January 15, 2021. The event consists of four milestones. Participants who meet their goals for the first three milestones will each receive a payment of $1000. For the fourth milestone, the SAOC Committee will evaluate each participant’s progress for the entire event. On that basis, one will be selected to receive a final $1000 payment and a free trip to the next real-world DConf (no registration fee; travel and lodging expenses reimbursed on the same terms as offered to DConf speakers). The lucky participant will be asked to submit a proposal for the same DConf they attend, but their proposal will be evaluated in the same manner as all proposals (i.e., acceptance is not guaranteed), but they are guaranteed free registration and reimbursement regardless.

Although Roberto Romaninho, our SAOC 2019 selectee, was robbed of the opportunity to attend DConf 2020, he will still be eligible to make use of his reward at our next real-world event along with the 2020 selectee. Francesco Gallà, who was selected in the inaugural SAOC 2018, gave a presentation about his project and the SAOC experience at DConf 2019. The runner up, Franceso Mecca, wrote about his own project for the D Blog.

SAOC 2020 applications are open until August 16. See the SAOC 2020 page for all the details on how to apply.

SAOC 2020 and Other News

Symmetry Autumn of Code 2020

Symmetry Investments logo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finances

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

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

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

DConf Online?

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

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!