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digitalmars.D.announce - D Language Foundation Quarterly Meeting Summary -- July 23, 2021

reply Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

At the end of 2018, the DLF began hosting quarterly meetings with 
representatives from companies using D in production. The 
motivation was to provide the companies with a means to directly 
communicate their headaches, issues, and ideas to the D 
maintainers. Their success is D's success, after all. We could 
also use their feedback, based on their experience using D in 
production, on moving the language forward.

At first, we didn't have the organizational structure in place to 
make things happen, so I was unable to report any progress on 
previous issues more often than I would have liked. But that has 
changed. With Razvan in place to oversee the progress of priority 
Bugzilla issues and fix them where he can, and strike teams now 
available to solve those he can't, we're in a much better 
position to resolve problematic issues no matter how they come to 
our attention (through these meetings, through forum posts, 
through Discord chats, etc). And we're slowly seeing our way more 
generally to a position where we will be able to resolve broader 
issues that don't fit into Bugzilla.

The companies have also given back. Some examples: the HR Fund 
for D Ecosystem Tasks came out of these meetings, seeded with a 
significant amount from Weka; Symmetry provided funding for the 
positions filled by Razvan and Max (Laeeth proposed the general 
idea outside of the meetings, but the final result was influenced 
by discussions in the meetings); Funkwerk has quietly been 
providing time once a quarter for one of their employees to work 
on solving issues on projects in the D ecosystem.

Aside from specific outcomes like the above, it's hard to measure 
the impact our discussions have had in terms of motivation, 
attitudes, inspiration, etc. I suspect that most of the regular 
attendees of these quarterly meetings would agree with me when I 
say that they have been productive. We may not have been able to 
help them solve every issue, and not all of the ideas may have 
panned out, but the major benefit from my perspective is that the 
meetings have gradually led to improved focus, direction, and 
organization to the management of D. It's still a work in 
progress, but progressing it is.

At one point, after one of these meetings wrapped up, the DLF 
folks hung around a while longer to focus on a couple of 
foundation-specific issues. This became a regular thing, and we 
soon began inviting the industry folks to stick around if they 
wanted. That ultimately led us to start having monthly DLF 
meetings from the beginning of this year.

I think there's no doubt that regular face-to-face contact, even 
if it's just over video, has significant benefits over text-only 
communication. And that's one of the reasons why we invited a few 
regular contributors to join us for a discussion of memory safety 
at the most recent quarterly meeting, which took place last 
Friday the 23rd.


Industry reps:

* Iain Buclaw representing GDC
* John Colvin representing Symmetry
* Martin Kinkelin representing LDC
* Mario Kröplin representing Funkwerk
* Mathias Lang representing BPF Korea
* Robert Schadek representing Symmetry
* Joseph Rushton Wakeling representing Frequenz

Contributors:

* Florian (MoonlightSentinel)
* Sebastiaan Koppe
* Dennis Korpel
* Vladimir Panteleev

And from the DLF:

* Andrei Alexandrescu
* Walter Bright
* Ali Çehreli
* Max Haughton
* Átila Neves
* Razvan Nitu
* Me


The meeting lasted 2.5 hours. It began on a really interesting 
note: when I went one-by-one to the industry folks, none of them 
had any major new issues to report. There are still some big, 
long-term issues we'll need to deal with at some point, such as 
long compile-times in certain codebases, but it was nice to hear 
so many "Nothing"'s when I went around the virtual table.

Through the first hour of discussion, we touched on a handful of 
different topics. These specific pull requests/bugzilla issues 
came up:

* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21919)
* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21989)
* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22025)
https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1756)
* [libdparse PR 
https://github.com/dlang-community/libdparse/pull/387)

Max brought up his ongoing project to get Ali's 'Programming in 
D' book onto the website. For anyone willing and able to help him 
get it across the finish line, the PR is here:

https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/3063

At this point, we prepared to open the memory safety discussion. 
Mathias was already slotted to participate via his role as a 
memory safety contributor, but we invited the other industry reps 
to stay around if they wanted to. They all did.

To start it off, Dennis was looking for direction on his [DIP 
1035], " system variables". Based on feedback in the first review 
round and his subsequent thinking on the topic, he was uncertain 
if the DIP still has merit. Walter, Átila, and Andrei agreed to 
consider the DIP and provide feedback on how to proceed.

[DIP 1035]: 
https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1035.md

The rest of the meeting was focused on DIP 1000. The discussion 
touched on a number of issues with the implementation. Some 
topics discussed: there are a number of accepts-invalid bugs; 
some changes unrelated to DIP 1000 have been lumped behind the 
`-preview=dip1000` switch; how to help new D programmers get up 
to speed with DIP 1000; the transition path for DIP 1000; and the 
relationship of preview switches and breaking changes. Dub also 
came up in a tangential discussion regarding an issue in which 
dependency configurations can pollute the caller.

Some specific pull requests/Bugzilla issues that were referenced 
in this discussion:

* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20023)
* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20150)
* [Bugzilla 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21525)
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/10951)

The discussion eventually led Mathias to pose this question: by 
what measure can we definitively declare that DIP 1000 is 
"ready"? A consensus was reached rather quickly when Walter put 
this forward: when there is no known way to escape a pointer from 
a function.

The issues brought up throughout this meeting are now on Razvan's 
radar as priorities. That doesn't mean they'll be solved very 
quickly, but they aren't going to be forgotten.

At the end of the meeting, I asked the DLF folks to review the 
current draft of the vision document, and we decided that we'll 
post it on dlang.org under the Community menu rather than on the 
wiki.



Our next monthly DLF meeting should take place on August 27, and 
the next quarterly meeting on October 29. We intend to continue 
inviting contributors to these meetings to discuss issues that 
affect them or topics on which they have demonstrated competency. 
In the interest of keeping the meetings manageable, we have to 
limit the number of topics and participants, but as time goes by 
we hope we can bring a variety of voices in.
Jul 27 2021
next sibling parent reply zjh <fqbqrr 163.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:





I have translated `Programming in D` in chinese. Here 
[用d编程](https://fqbqrr.blog.csdn.net/article/details/104605383)
Jul 28 2021
parent reply =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:
On 7/28/21 12:07 AM, zjh wrote:

 On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:




=20
=20
 I have translated `Programming in D` in chinese. Here [=E7=94=A8d=E7=BC=


=96=E7=A8=8B]=20

 (https://fqbqrr.blog.csdn.net/article/details/104605383)
=20


Impressive! :) Is that abbreviated or all of it?

Ali
Jul 28 2021
parent reply zjh <fqbqrr 163.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 16:46:49 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:

 On 7/28/21 12:07 AM, zjh wrote:

 On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:





 Impressive! :) Is that abbreviated or all of it?

 Ali



I translated it directly without asking you for permission . I'm 
sorry.
All.
Jul 28 2021
parent =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:
On 7/28/21 4:34 PM, zjh wrote:

 On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 16:46:49 UTC, Ali =C3=87ehreli wrote:

 On 7/28/21 12:07 AM, zjh wrote:

 On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:




=20

 Impressive! :) Is that abbreviated or all of it?

 Ali


=20
=20
 I translated it directly without asking you for permission . I'm sorry.=



 All.
=20


No permission required. Here is the license:

   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

Thank you for *not* involving me. :)

Ali
Jul 28 2021
prev sibling parent reply Bastiaan Veelo <Bastiaan Veelo.net> writes:
On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 * Joseph Rushton Wakeling representing Frequenz


I know Joseph, but haven't heard of Frequenz. Can't find them on 
https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html. Is there any news to be 
announced?

-- Bastiaan.
Jul 28 2021
parent Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 10:58:58 UTC, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:

 On Wednesday, 28 July 2021 at 06:37:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 * Joseph Rushton Wakeling representing Frequenz


 I know Joseph, but haven't heard of Frequenz. Can't find them 
 on https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html. Is there any news to be 
 announced?

 -- Bastiaan.


Nothing to announce yet. It was put together by the Sociomantic 
founders. I'll leave it to Joseph to say more, but their website 
is here:

https://frequenz.com/
Jul 28 2021