larsivi

A few weeks ago, I entered Tango as a project for the Hackontest - a 24 hour hacking contest for 3 select features for various open source projects. The hacking will be done by teams of 3. For those attending, there will be cash prizes and most likely an exciting trip to Zurich, Switzerland.

Now, the catch is that a jury will select the 3 projects/features that will be part of the competition proper, and these will be chosen from those entered at the site linked further up.

When I registered Tango, there was a

A recurring complaint against D, is the quality of the compilers. Currently there are two in a usable state - DMD and GDC, with LLVMDC, Dil and Dang as follow ups.

This post is about the first two, as I don't consider a D compiler usable until it can compile Tango and its examples.

DMD is quite stable, especially its 1.0x branch - but the most annoying bugs - those that it is hardest to find workarounds for - tend to have a low priority. The reasoning seems mostly to be that the fruits are hanging to high. Also, it does have fairly unstable optimization - while developing Tango XML, just moving a function in the source could

KeYeR (Piotr) called upon me in #D and said that my statement "This is one of the worse decisions among the bad ones in the D history." was bad English. No, not really. He said that it was a strong statement, and sure, it is. I tend to be (unnecessarily so?) strong in my rather few statements on design choices in the D language. Peter added that he was afraid that I was right.

As I see it, Walter here is willingly implementing a solution that 99% of the community seems to hate. He even had a different implementation, the manifest keyword, that was applauded

When I talked about the three T's, the last one stood for TODO. Well, in the Tango world, i probably should have made that Ticket. Since our latest release, the reactions have been relaxed, mostly due to the holidays I guess (and partially because the contents were well known). Only 9 tickets have been created since then, and at least 5 of them were web and documentation related. The web part is natural, as I redid the layout of the Tango frontpage, hopefully for the much better (at least visually, I believe we could do it in a more proper styles based manner, please join us if you think so). I think the tickets related to this change were all resolved.

As for the docs, one ticket was about private members in the DDoc output. Now, this is easily removed by changing the style of the source code comments, but do anyone know if this is

Which Ts are these? Well, lets start with the first, Time. Just a lame excuse to why I haven't written anything here for a long time. I've had precious little time for this blog lately. Time has been spent on non-D work, moving, refurbishing a kitchen, writing a book. And the latter is probably a major reason, writing books seems to zap a lot of writing power, making for a sad blogging statistics. We're highly

We just released the next version of Tango, 0.99.1, which is mostly a bugfix release. To the Tango team, events surrounding it are encouraging though, as they show that Tango gains more users and more compatible libraries.

In addition to the compression stream filters by Daniel Keep, many of the bugfixes in this release, were due to patches and suggestions by users. As such, one bug in the collections package was reported 4 times over a

From time to time, Walter says that we need to do things that will increase the visibility of D outside of the D community. Each little effort is in itself probably too small for a noticable effect, but over time and with many such efforts, we make a difference.

I try to take every opportunity, both because I want D to succeed, but also because I want to succeed in having D programming as my main source of income. Of course, when I discuss and plug D, I usally

After 3 days of pure D'ness, the conference is now over. And yes, the trip was definately worth it! Putting faces to those I hadn't seen pictures of was very good, and it was very nice to talk to people in person that I previously may spent a few harsh words with on the newsgroup. It's so much easier to understand the full length of the other's meaning when one is face-to-face.

It was also funny being greeted with "Hey, I read your blog!" (Good meeting you, Paul ;). Other surprises included another Norwegian (who's even situated north of me), Brynjard.

The first and second day included the talks as can

I arrived in Seattle about 6pm local time last night. After a very long and interesting process to get into the country (fingerprints, photos, etc.), especially compared to what I'm used to in Europe, Frank Benoit was waiting for me by the baggage conveyor belt.

We went to find some transport into the city, and while waiting for our Shuttle Express, lo and behold, someone called my name (after seeing it on the screen for the SE). It was Sean Kelly and his wife Leah, and they we're even getting the same SE! Here I've been chatting with Sean almost daily for at least the last 18 months, and then suddenly he's standing a meter away.

I have been rather busy with all kinds of stuff over the last 6-7 weeks, like vacation, moving, etc. I'm now finally ready for the D conference in Seattle though, which is why I'm currently sitting at Kastrup, the airport in Copenhagen, waiting for my flight to Seattle (which of course is a couple of hours late). Can't wait to see quite a few of you over there :)