News and Opinions of the Digital Mars D Programming Language
Shame on me for not mentioning this sooner, but if you follow the announcement NG or PlanetD, you will already know about Pragma’s new blog. If you have no idea who Pragma is, you can read more about him in the May Q&A.
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The new extern(System) was broken in 1.019, so Walter has issued a new release that fixes it.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, DMD, Digital Mars, Walter Bright
Two new DMD releases, the stable 1.019 and the unstable 2.003. Both share a handful of bug fixes and and a couple of new features. One feature in particular is good news for me: extern(System). This is a concise and intuitive solution to a problem I was having with Derelict recently. The solution I implemented really was, in my mind, less than ideal. It works though. I don’t think I’ll be updating to the new solution just yet, however. Doing so would force DMD users to upgrade to 1.019 and would also break on GDC. The former isn’t a big deal, really, as anyone using older versions of DMD could just use an older snapshot of Derelict. The latter is a big deal as it is not uncommon for new Derelict users to prefer GDC. I do expect to update at some point, but it will be well after GDC is updated again.
There are also a couple of new features exclusive to the 2.0 branch. The big one that stands out for me is the ForeachRangeStatement. I’ve encountered a few instances in my own code where this would have come in handy. Too bad I’m not on 2.0 yet. If you are considering it, please keep in mind that the 2.0 series is not yet production ready and should be considered pre-alpha. Things can, and will, break with 2.0, as the change with Error.next demonstrates (I always felt it should have been in Exception anyway).
Thanks for the cool new stuff, Walter!
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, DMD, Digital Mars, Walter Bright, Derelict
Clay Smith has announced version 0.2 of the Arc 2D game library. From the NG:
1) Basic GUI System (v.3 planned full fledged GUI system)
2) 2D Physics System with shapes Box and Circle (v.3 planned polygons)
3) 2D Scene-graph System
4) Updated Sound System to use OpenAL with code generously donated from
Eric Poggel who’s working on the Yage project on dsource5) Hidden resource management system
6) Updated font system to h3r3tic’s font system
7) Joystick support patched by Lutger (Thanks!)
All these random closed tickets and miscellaneous bug fixes http://www.dsource.org/projects/arclib/report/6
Arc is set up to work out of the box with DSSS. Clay also posted instructions on how to do so:
You can grab Arc v.2 release with this DSSS command:
dsss net install arclib
You can grab arc unittest and the example asteroids game with the DSSS
command:dsss net install arclib-unittest
dsss net install arclib-examples
DSSS will also grab all the media files that correspond to the programs
and put them appropriately in the DSSS BIN folder. On windows, it will
grab all the files you need including dll’s and then you can simply
click the programs and watch them run.
I’m not a DSSS user myself, but all of that certainly makes it sound somewhat appealing. Give feedback on and look for help with Arc in #arclib or the project forums.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, game programming, game development, 2D graphics
A new Tango release candidate is out the door. This release includes some great new additions:
* Added clustering solution
* Added stream abstractions to the IO layer
* Added initial VFS implementation
* Replaced tango.util.locks with tango.core.sync
* Added Variant
* Updated for DMD 1.018
* More documentation
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