When Andrei Alexandrescu stepped down as deputy leader of the D programming language, I was asked to take over the role going forward. It’s needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, that those are some pretty big shoes to fill. I’m still settling into my new role in the community and figuring out how … Continue reading My Vision of D’s Future
Read more...Category: The Language
Ownership and Borrowing in D
Posted onNearly all non-trivial programs allocate and manage memory. Getting it right is becoming increasingly important, as programs get ever more complex and mistakes get ever more costly. The usual problems are: memory leaks (failure to free memory when no longer in use) double frees (freeing memory more than once) use-after-free (continuing to refer to memory … Continue reading Ownership and Borrowing in D
Read more...Using const to Enforce Design Decisions
Posted onThe saying goes that the best code is no code. As soon as a project starts to grow, technical debt is introduced. When a team is forced to adapt to a new company guideline inconsistent with their previous vision, the debt results from a business decision. This could be tackled at the company level. Sometimes … Continue reading Using const to Enforce Design Decisions
Read more...Lost in Translation: Encapsulation
Posted onD programmers come from a variety of programming backgrounds, C-family languages perhaps being the most common among them. Understanding the differences and how familiar features are tailored to D can open the door to more possibilities for organizing a code base, and designing and implementing an API. This article is the first of a few that will examine D features that can be overlooked or misunderstood by those experienced in similar languages.
Read more...Go Your Own Way (Part Two: The Heap)
Posted onThis post is part of an ongoing series on garbage collection in the D Programming Language, and the second of two regarding the allocation of memory outside of the GC. Part One discusses stack allocation. Here, we’ll look at allocating memory from the non-GC heap.
Read more...D as a Better C
Posted onThere are large and immensely useful programs written in C, such as the Linux operating system and a very large chunk of the programs written for it. While D programs can interface with C libraries, the reverse isn’t true. C programs cannot interface with D ones. It’s not possible (at least not without considerable effort) to compile a couple of D files and link them in to a C program. The trouble is that compiled D files refer to things that only exist in the D runtime library, and linking that in (it’s a bit large) tends to be impractical.
That is, until Better C came along.
Read more...Don’t Fear the Reaper
Posted onD, like many other programming languages in active use today, comes with a garbage collector out of the box. There are many types of software that can be written without worrying at all about the GC, taking full advantage of its benefits. But the GC does have drawbacks, and there are certainly scenarios in which … Continue reading Don’t Fear the Reaper
Read more...Editable and Runnable Doc Examples on dlang.org
Posted onSebastian Wilzbach was a GSoC student for the D Language Foundation in 2016 and has since become a regular contributor to Phobos, D’s standard library, and dlang.org. This article explains the steps that were needed to have editable and runnable examples in the documentation on dlang.org. First, let’s begin with the building blocks. Unit testing in D … Continue reading Editable and Runnable Doc Examples on dlang.org
Read more...A New Import Idiom
Posted onDaniel Nielsen is an Embedded Software Engineer. He is currently using D in his spare time for an unpublished Roguelike and warns that he “may produce bursts of D Evangelism”. I remember one day in my youth, before the dawn of Internet, telling my teachers about “my” new algorithm, only to learn it had been … Continue reading A New Import Idiom
Read more...Testing In The D Standard Library
Posted onJack Stouffer is a member of the Phobos team and a contributor to dlang.org. You can check out more of his writing on his blog. In the D standard library, colloquially named Phobos, we take a multi-pronged approach to testing and code review. Currently, there are five different services any addition has to go through: … Continue reading Testing In The D Standard Library
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