Programming

DDBI on the road again

As have already been noted on D.announce, I have started committing new code to DDBI. The task at hand is to refine the interfaces, make it easier to use where possible, and use as little resources as possible (this isn't necessarily easy given that fetched data need to stay in memory somewhere).

I have committed some new interfaces in dbi/model/ and implemented those (mostly at least) for mysql. SQLite will be the next to be added, and after that maybe PostgreSQL. I expect to have to rely on contributions for anything beyond that.

If you have any thoughts on the work I've been doing, please contact me. My current thoughts involve adding multi statement/multi result support (thanks BCS), make sure optional allocators can be used properly (and in all places applicable), how to best fetch results and error handling.

Tango Conference approaching!

The first Tango Conference is approaching, and I'm giddy with expectations. I think the program is looking very good, and I'm happy that we got some speakers from across the pond.

The site of the conference is an excellent fit, with it being the first University to hold a D class. Torun, Poland is in addition a town with a very pretty medieval city centre, see the images here.

I expect to meet up with several of the other visitors already at the airport in Warsaw the day before the conference start, and except for Frank Benoit, these will be people I haven't met before, but that are active in the Tango community.

Mention in Computerworld.au

I'm to some degree active on LinkedIn and my answer to a question there led to the quotes that can be found in this article. Although the name isn't mentioned, my quotes are all taken from my work on Tango.

The article is about how easy/difficult it is to write/use open source software on Macs. Although I am fully behind my quotes there, she did leave out the ones that weren't so negative.

To tweet or not to tweet

I recently got my self a twitter account, and not very surprisingly you can find it at http://twitter.com/larsivi. The reasoning behind the move is that I don't want to post too much low quality content to this blog, and thus I end up seldomly really having to time to write here. With twitter I can make short notes and anecdotes without worrying about quality.

I'm not normally interested in the daily dealings of all people around the world, but see Twitter as an easy way to post thoughts around the open source work I do, and a bit of software development in general. Considering this, I think I find Ohloh's journals a better idea (or a better match towards what I want), but I'm not sure many enough of the D users use Ohloh to make the feature work for me. Also, Twitter could spread the "word" wider, although I guess the "word" would be considered less interesting to most potential readers.

Google's treasure hunt - task 2

I don't normally bother (or have time for) the various programming competitions on the net. This one caught my eye however, as I find the Tango implementation fairly short and elegant (the one that prompted my attention was in F# and wasn't particularly readable IMO, but then I'm not really into functional programming).

The task (see here to get your instance) is to process a directory tree (provided from Google in a zip file), and sum up values on certain lines of certain files.

My instance told me to sum values on line 5 in files with extension ".js" and with "BCD" somewhere in the path and multiply that with the sum of the values on line 1 in files with extension ".txt" and with "zzz" somewhere in the path. Empty lines should not be counted (I probably misunderstood something as an empty line would only have yielded a zero value for the sum in any case, but I got the correct result according to Google).

Tango and the Hackontest

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

Compiler quality

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

The three Ts

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

Moving Tango Forward

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

Publicity and Visibility

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

Syndicate content