D Programming Language News

I've just spent the last 20 minutes or so reading up about swig ( http://www.swig.org ) and I'm impressed. Since there are already language bindings connecting C/C++ to Java, C#, Perl, Python, PHP, OCaml (and a few other languages), it shouldn't be too difficult to use those implementations as a reference for creating a D SWIG extension.

In my opinion, this is the most important project for D in the upcoming year. Because if we can assemble a general purpose method for creating bindings between C++ and D, we'll open up access to lots of existing libraries that we can't use now.

As soon as I've got the repository site up and running, this is one of the projects I'g going to create.

9/16/03 Matthew Wilson writes:

There are several new small housekeeping modules, along with the synsoft.win32.reg module that does registry stuff.

I've also changed the names of several methods in previous modules (I've decided to standardise on ThisKindOfMethodName, rather than this_kind_of_method_name()), but because of a linker weirdness - it wouldn't link when there were start() and Start() methods in the same class - the deprecated functions with the old names have had to be removed. Apologies if this causes problems. ;/

The registry library, like the other ones, is a header-only from a source-perspective (i.e. the method bodies are stripped). This is not because I'm being precious, just that I only want any attention you may give on the module's API, not the implementation. Once this module is matured, it may be going into Phobos, at which point, obviously, all source will be available.

Note that the reg module only does enumeration for the moment. I've not yet decided on the format for adding/deleting keys/values, and am happy to hear some suggestions from anyone.

Alas, there are still no test programs, but I'm including my test program for the registry module here. Version 1.3 of the libraries will have test and sample progs, I promise.

(I've got to toddle off and do some other things - deadlines, deadlines - but I'll be keeping an eye on the ng, and will try to respond to feedback/questions/abuse. ;) )

Enjoy!

9/13/03 Carlos Santander writes:

9/10/03 Carlos Santander writes:

9/9/03 Ant writes:

GtkGLExt
http://gtkglext.sourceforge.net/

(I need to put a big digital mars logo on DUI home page, maybe a D logo...)

DUI
http://ca.geocities.com/duitoolkit/

9/6/03 Simon J Mackenzie writes:

9/4/03 Kazuhiro Inaba writes:

A few pages ( D String/Complex/DbC vs C++'s ) are not done yet, but i'll finish them soon.

8/25/03 Ben Hinkle writes:

http://dlanguage.netunify.com/38

The basic support is for most of the syntax and keywords and font-lock for highlighting. Some D-specific constructs aren't supported like nested comments (I've been wrestling with cc-engine.el to figure out how cc-mode parses comments -ugh!), but in general I've found it does a reasonable job with most of the sample files and phobos.

Hopefully I'm not sucking up too much of the upload space. If I am I'll find another spot to park it. I also added an entry to that wiki for emacs. I've only tried it on Windows but I don't imagine linux emacs would have any problem.

enjoy,
-Ben Hinkle

8/25/03 Helmut Leitner writes:

- The link bar now contains Index and Folder links.

- I changed "Members" and "FolderMembers" to "Contributors" and "FolderContributors" which seems more approriate.

I may be a bit disappointing for some that Wikis grow slowly but in fact a Wiki is an invitation to join in for common writing and not the presentation of a sparkling and ready "product".

Some pages slowly begin to show shape, like e.g.: http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?FaqRoadmap

Things that would be needed but havn't yet evolved:

- a page for ongoing projects (although there is an incomplete list on the FrontPage)

- a page for wanted projects, although there is http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?SuggestedProjects

- a page for library design considerations and standards

Please take the Wiki as a public space that you are a co-owner of.

8/13/03 Jussi Jumppanen adds D support to Zeus:

8/10/03 Ant writes:

home page (temporary I hope):

http://ca.geocities.com/duitoolkit/index.html.

download page:

http://ca.geocities.com/duitoolkit/downloadPage.html

Some notes:

This is a very early alpha release to let interested people look at the options an directions DUI is taking. Comments and suggestions are welcome, if you are interested in using DUI this is the time to influence it's devel.

This is Linux only (other Un*x flavors might be easy to use)

My Makefiles knowleadge is limited so probably you have to change the Makefile to suit your environment

8/10/03 Mike Wynn writes:

I see from microsofts site that a Quake2 in C# have just released (source and all) anyone fancy porting it to D ?

8/7/03 Simon J Mackenzie writes:

D syntax highlighting is to be incorporated with KDE as part of the Kate editor in the future.

7/30/03 Charles Sanders writes:

www.atari-soldiers.com

Im planning on adding code browser soon (thanks to keith's great idea of CTAGS! ), and then a dialog editor.

I'm waiting on approval from sourceforge for DublN (CPAN like tool ), but they are taking a suspiciously long time to respond. I would host it but my hosting company doesnt offer mysql, does anyone have any room somewhere so we can get started on this ?

I noticed a link called D journal on the DM page, I have room to host it if someone wants to write it ?

Charles

7/30/03 Burton Radons writes:

That's a nice little library. The last one I tried to work with was Berkeley's in Python, and that soured me so bad on small database libraries (the format wasn't portable between Windows and Linux!) that I didn't think there could be a useful one.

So I'm working on a wrapper for SQLite that uses the DLL and supplies a class, including little niceties like buffered table modifications. A beta should be done in a couple of hours.

I've attached the import library and import headers for them. You'll need the DLL from the SQLite site. This should also work on the Linux side using the .so.

7/30/03 Jon Frechette writes:

I've just started trying to learn the D language and I really like it so far. It seems that the example code included with the compiler is pretty short on language features and uses no OOP at all. So, I created another version of the wordcount program that uses every D feature I could learn.

I have attached the source code in case it might be of some value to Walter's effort.

Ps: I may have recreated the wheel in places, so any comments would be welcomed by this newbie.

Thanks

7/29/03 Simon J Mackenzie writes:

Here's a 1st cut at systax highlighting for the KDE Advance Text Editor.

d.xml needs to be placed in OME/.kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax

Simon

7/27/03 Marten Ask writes:

I've written a very basic cgi module. It parses headers, querystrings and forms as well as getting and settings cookies. It needs lots of more work, but is quite useful already. Anyway, I've tested it a little and was hoping that others might test it aswell so I can add useful stuff. I've only used PHP before and all this strong typing really hurts my brain! :-) So I could use some help..

Anyway, I'll send the module along and here's a small test program I wrote:

import cgi;

void main()
{
 Request req = new Request();
 Response res = new Response();

 if(req.serverVariable("REQUEST_METHOD") == "POST")
 {
  char[] name = req.formString("name"); // returns formfield value as string
  char[] comment = req.formString("comment");
  res.cookie("name", name, "", "", "", 0);
  res.write("<html>\n<head>\n<title>CGI-test</title>\n</head>\n");
  res.write("<body>\n");
  res.write("Hello <b>"~name~"</b><p>\n");
  res.write("You wrote:\n");
  res.write("<blockquote><b>\""~comment~"\"</b></blockquote>\n");
  res.write("<a href='cgitest.exe'>Back to form</a>");
  res.write("</body></html>");
  res.flush();
 }
 else
 {
  char[] cookie;
  try
  {
   cookie = req.cookie("name");
  }
  catch(CGIError) // cookie wasn't set!
  {
   cookie = "";
  }

  printf(res.getHeaders()~"\n\n");
  printf("<html>\n<head>\n<title>CGI-test</title>\n</head>\n");
  printf("<body>\n");
  printf("<form method='post' action='cgitest.exe'>\n");
  printf("Name: <input type='text' name='name' value='%.*s'><br>\n",cookie);
  printf("Comment: <input type='text' name='comment'><br>\n");
  printf("<input type='submit' value='Send!'>\n");
  printf("</form></body></html");
 }
}

7/24/03 Burton Radons writes:

Not through direct syntax. You can synthesize one using a static member and function. You can also force memory recycling:

    class Singleton
    {
        static Singleton singleton;

        new (uint size)
        {
            if (singleton === null)
            {
                singleton = (Singleton) new void * [(size + 3) / 4];
                singleton.init ();
            }
            return singleton;
        }

        /* This is used instead of a constructor to avoid having the 
	   constructor called multiple times. */
        void init ()
        {
            /* Prepare the singleton. */
        }
    }

    Singleton a = new Singleton (); /* Create the new singleton. */
    Singleton b = new Singleton (); /* Recycle the old singleton. */
    

One might ask what I'm doing using "new void * [size / 4]" instead of "new ubyte [size]". Once the GC is type-aware, casting between an array of values and an object reference will result in any pointers in the object being collected. I think I've advocated putting in casting limitations to prevent the problem before, but in any case I am now; you should not be able to cast between a value array and a pointer.

7/18/03 Simon J Mackenzie writes:

Link is now http://users.tpg.com.au/smackoz/projects/d/d_kde_support.tar.bz2

Simon J Mackenzie wrote:
> I've created some Linux mime type images for D. You can download the
> tar.bz2 files with all requred images, 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 48x48,
> 64x64, 128x128 from http://users.tpg.com.au/smackoz/
>
> Use the dmd.png image to impove the appearance of your folder image for
> DMD (works with KDE, ??other desktops??).
>
> Simon
>

7/8/03 Burton Radons writes:

> Is it possible to download a file from the internet through a D program?
> Where might I find instructions on how to do such a thing?

I put up a library for doing this back in March. Here's a copy of the release notes:

I've put up a simple URL loading library at (http://www.opend.org/urllib.zip). It requires dig to be installed, although it doesn't use it, just digc. Comes with the documentation. It has the functions:

urlopen: Open a URL as a stream (http, file, ftp, nntp, and dict schema supported).
urlread: Open a URL and read its contents.
urllistdir: List a directory, return an array of URLStat (file and ftp schema supported).
urlencode, urldecode: Encode and decode the URL. The above functions expect a decoded URL.

There's also a small, simple, not-thought-out sockets library.

6/27/03 Vathix writes:

6/25/03 Benji Smith writes:

I may be missing something, but I haven't found any information in the D
documentation for how to declare associative array literal values all at once.

For example, once I've declared an array as:

char[char[]][] myArray;

I can now only add values to that array one at a time, as follows:

myArray["red"] = "ff0000";
myArray["green"] = "00ff00";
myArray["green"] = "0000ff";

What I'd like to be able to do (especially in cases where I have lots of values
to add to the array) would look something like this:

myArray = {

"red" => "ff0000",
"green" => "00ff00",
"blue" => "0000ff"

};

 ..or something like that. I don't really care about the {} braces or the =>
 operator, but I would like something that lets me declare an associative array
 literal, just like I can declare a static array using the code:

int[] def = { 1, 2, 3 };

6/19/03 Mark Evans writes:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/impulse/

"Von Neumann's prediction of 1945 continues to hold true - memory is the primary system bottleneck."

6/17/03 Daniel Yokomiso writes:

The ICFP 2003 is coming ( http://icfpcontest.org/ ), going from 2003-06-28 to 2003-06-30. Are people here interested in losing a weekend for it. I know I am ;)
As usual we have no idea about this year's task, but I think a team of 3 to 6 developers should be enough. Also if we give it a shot and get ourselves a nice place we could get some attention for D.

5/30/03 Alisdair Meredith writes: