• Mike Parker (142/142) Feb 20 2023 As we are now nearly two months into the new year, I'm becoming
• Imperatorn (2/9) Feb 20 2023 Hallelujah! 🥰
• Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole (13/30) Feb 20 2023 I'm currently working on a DIP to redesign export to allow for symbols
• Gavin Ray (2/2) Feb 20 2023 Thanks as always for the updates Mike!
• Dukc (5/25) Feb 23 2023 This sure is in line with what many have been suggesting.

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

As we are now nearly two months into the new year, I'm becoming 
both excited and anxious.

I'm excited because some of the ideas and goals I and others have 
had for D, the community, and the ecosystem, are starting to take 
shape. I'm eagerly anticipating the announcements I'll be able to 
make as the year progresses.

I'm anxious because the work needed to be able to make some of 
those announcements is not trivial. We have a lot to do and, as 
always, we're faced with limited resources. At the moment, we're 
learning some skills that we can apply to both organize the 
resources we do have and pull in more. I'm confident we can make 
it happen, but it sill feels a bit daunting.

I can't be more specific than that at the moment, but the time 
that I can start being specific isn't too far away.

For now, I do have a few announcements I can make.


For starters, please keep your gripes and wishes coming in to 
social dlang.org. The flood became a trickle and has been quiet 
for a bit now. I'll post a separate reminder about this at the 
end of this month, but I plan to keep taking emails on this until 
the end of March. At the end of March or in early April I'll 
start organizing everything that people have sent in. I'll 
publish it for everyone to view and discuss, and we'll start 
discussing internally what we can and can't achieve, what is and 
isn't a priority, etc. The more data we have the better, so 
please keep it coming!


As a result of a discussion that took place during our January 
meeting (summary coming this week!), Walter and Átila have 
decided to shift gears a bit. For the next year, they want to 
emphasize stability and robustness.

Generally, that means giving priority to issues deemed 
fundamental, such as features that aren't working as advertised, 
or long-standing bugs that detract from the user experience. As a 
start, Walter has lately been working on circular reference bugs, 
issues with features like `export` and `.di` generation, etc.

Over the coming months, I expect we'll start looking beyond 
one-off issues from Bugzilla to see how we can tackle more 
complex problems, like reducing compile times, solving template 
emission bugs, etc.

This is one area where the gripes lists will come in handy. So 
again, please keep them coming!



As of last month, our Flipcause account is no longer active. Most 
everyone who was supporting us there has already moved over to 
PayPal or Open Collective. Thanks to all of you who continue to 
support us.

Now we have a new option. We've finally gotten GitHub Sponsors 
set up. For now, the tiers are set up to roughly mirror those at 
Open Collective. That's just a start. We'll look at adjusting all 
of the tiers across both sites in the coming months. I haven't 
yet [added it to the donate 
page](https://dlang.org/foundation/donate.html), but I'll get to 
it soon.

If you are able to support us, even if it's only a few dollars 
here and there, please consider doing so when you can. In the 
coming months, we'll need all the funding we can get in order to 
carry out much needed change. For example, we're going to ramp up 
a number of servers to migrate various ecosystem services to 
Foundation management (the plans are on hold right now, but only 
for a short while longer), and some of the work that needs doing 
will have to be done on a contract basis if it's going to get 
done at all.

As an example, our server bill is only around $50/month right 
now. That's the server to which Vladimir Panteleev recently 
migrated the documentation tester for a 50% increase in build 
times. We should be able to use the same box for some other 
things, but our server bill is going to increase at some point.

Down the road, I plan to set something up to show our financial 
flow. But in the meantime, any amount we can stash in the 
reserves right now will come in handy at a later date. So thanks 
to any financial support you can give us.

As a reminder, please keep an eye on our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/ TheDLanguageFoundation

Now that we're in the YouTube Partner Program, watching, liking, 
and sharing our videos is one of the easiest ways you can support 
us.


As of now, **the DIP queue is closed to new DIPs**.

DIPs that are already in review or that are already in the PR 
queue can still go forward, but please do not submit any new DIPs 
for the time being.

The DIP process is getting a long-needed overhaul. Over time, 
I've had feedback from people who have authored DIPs and those 
who decided not to. There are a number of different opinions 
about how things can change, but there are some common themes 
among them.

I'll write in more detail about this later, but there are a few 
major goals I have with the overhaul:

* reduce the burden on the author
* reduce the amount of time a submitted DIP is in review
* establish support for fleshing out ideas before a DIP is even 
written
* establish support for developing initial DIP drafts before they 
are submitted

Previously, I'd always considered development of the DIP separate 
from the DIP "process", which I saw as beginning with the 
submission of a pull request. In reality, the process begins even 
before an author opens an editor to start typing. I hope that by 
recognizing that, and by providing support for discussing ideas 
and writing the DIP, we'll foster an environment that still 
maintains a relatively high bar for DIPs that get submitted, but 
also creates a filter such that potential DIP authors can be more 
confident that they aren't wasting their time once they get to 
the development stage. By the time they get there, they'll have 
no doubt if it's an idea worth pursuing.

I expect the freeze to last a few months. I'll be more concrete 
about dates when I can.

In the meantime, as I have mentioned before, I'm eliminating the 
Final Review round from the process we have now, and I'm willing 
to run more than one review at a time. If you have submitted a 
DIP to the PR queue, I'll be in touch soon to see if you're ready 
to move forward.


I intend to publish the January and February meeting summaries by 
the end of this week. As I mentioned before, I botched my 
recording of the January meeting (the audio output wasn't 
recorded, only my microphone was). Given the black hole that is 
my memory, I had to enlist the help of some of the attendees to 
gather up enough info for the summary. It won't be at the level 
of detail you're used to, but it's the best I can do. The 
recording of the February meeting is fine, so that summary will 
be normal.

I hope very soon now to finally be able to share some news that 
I'd agreed to be quiet about for a few weeks. It's the first step 
we've taken to a new future for the D Language Foundation. We're 
all very excited by it. I don't know if it will have the same 
effect in the community at large, but I hope it shows how serious 
we are about rolling up our sleeves and belatedly adapting to 
circumstances that have changed and continue to change.

I'll say more about that as soon as I can. I'll close now with a 
few reminders.

* If you can contribute to a project anywhere in the ecosystem, 
please do so!
* If you can contribute to the core DLang projects and aren't 
sure what to do, please contact Razvan or Dennis!
* If you are able to support us financially in any way at all, 
[please do so](https://dlang.org/foundation/donate.html)!
* Blog and tweet about your D projects!
* Share [our YouTube 
videos](https://www.youtube.com/ TheDLanguageFoundation) far and 
wide!

Imperatorn <johan_forsberg_86 hotmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 20 February 2023 at 12:38:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 As we are now nearly two months into the new year, I'm becoming 
 both excited and anxious.


 As a result of a discussion that took place during our January 
 meeting (summary coming this week!), Walter and Átila have 
 decided to shift gears a bit. For the next year, they want to 
 emphasize stability and robustness.

Hallelujah! 🥰

"Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole" <richard cattermole.co.nz> writes:

On 21/02/2023 1:38 AM, Mike Parker wrote:

 As a result of a discussion that took place during our January meeting 
 (summary coming this week!), Walter and Átila have decided to shift 
 gears a bit. For the next year, they want to emphasize stability and 
 robustness.
 
 Generally, that means giving priority to issues deemed fundamental, such 
 as features that aren't working as advertised, or long-standing bugs 
 that detract from the user experience. As a start, Walter has lately 
 been working on circular reference bugs, issues with features like 
 `export` and `.di` generation, etc.
 
 Over the coming months, I expect we'll start looking beyond one-off 
 issues from Bugzilla to see how we can tackle more complex problems, 
 like reducing compile times, solving template emission bugs, etc.

I'm currently working on a DIP to redesign export to allow for symbols 
to work correctly wrt. DLL's (the work currently will only get it to be 
usable, not 100%).

Its going to be a pretty dry and unexciting DIP, if you don't use shared 
libraries you will probably not notice anything.

I am excited for it though. Will have to table it for after DIP process 
work is done tho!

 I expect the freeze to last a few months. I'll be more concrete about 
 dates when I can.

That may be a bit long for the above work, but I'm sure we'll make 
something work, even if its just a test run of the new system :)



This year has got a good chance to be really exciting! Just missing work 
on compiler hooks, tuples, sum types and value type exceptions (which of 
course I didn't PR into the DIP queue and is basically done lol).

Gavin Ray <ray.gavin97 gmail.com> writes:

Thanks as always for the updates Mike!

I wrote in to that "social dlang.org" email with some feedback =)

Dukc <ajieskola gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 20 February 2023 at 12:38:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 I'm excited because some of the ideas and goals I and others 
 have had for D, the community, and the ecosystem, are starting 
 to take shape. I'm eagerly anticipating the announcements I'll 
 be able to make as the year progresses.

Sounds big! Hopefully includes Phobos v2.

 As a result of a discussion that took place during our January 
 meeting (summary coming this week!), Walter and Átila have 
 decided to shift gears a bit. For the next year, they want to 
 emphasize stability and robustness.

This sure is in line with what many have been suggesting.

 In the meantime, as I have mentioned before, I'm eliminating 
 the Final Review round from the process we have now, and I'm 
 willing to run more than one review at a time. If you have 
 submitted a DIP to the PR queue, I'll be in touch soon to see 
 if you're ready to move forward.

Excellent.

 I intend to publish the January and February meeting summaries 
 by the end of this week. As I mentioned before, I botched my 
 recording of the January meeting (the audio output wasn't 
 recorded, only my microphone was). Given the black hole that is 
 my memory, I had to enlist the help of some of the attendees to 
 gather up enough info for the summary. It won't be at the level 
 of detail you're used to, but it's the best I can do.

I'm sorry. Good try anyway.