The One With D

Catching Up

I haven’t been completely absent from D-land the past couple of weeks. I’ve been firing up Thunderbird every few days to browse through the newsgroups. A few announcements I recall: Chris released a new version of DFL; Gregor released a couple of new versions of DSSS; Bruno Medeiros released the first version of a new Eclipse-based IDE for D, derived from Descent and named Mmrnmhrm (mer-nem-herm) — just drop the jars in your Eclipse plugins directory (requires Eclipse 3.3 and Java 1.5 or later). I’m sure there was more, but I don’t feel like going back through all of those threads right now.

I’ve also been keeping abreast of the Derelict forums in case any fires sprung up there. It’s been quite calm, thankfully. Though, it was brought to my attention that the latest version of DevIL sort of breaks the DerelictIL bindings since a function was apparently removed from the API. I’ll be getting around to fixing that up Real Soon Now.

I unashamedly admit that I took five days away from anything resembling work last week, other than my English classes, in order to catch up on my reading and play some games that have been languishing on my hard drive. The break must have enchanted me, as my productivity has shot through the roof the past couple of days. I’m almost finished with all of the proofreading work I’ve had in the queue. I wasn’t expecting to be back to D-land until next week, but I’ll be able to get back to it a few days sooner it seems. Too bad I can’t make the conference.

I haven’t yet emailed my two Q&A targets to ask if they are interested. I’m going to get on that in just a little bit, so it may be a week or so before I have anything to post from them. Regardless, I’m back on the blog job.

Technorati Tags: D Programming Language

Posted in GUI, IDE, News | 2 Comments »

Busy Days

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. As much as I intended not to be in this position again, I’ve found myself with several things going on at once. As a result, Smoothie is suffering, Derelict is suffering and Tango.graphics is suffering. One of the things I’m working on is D related and will be a tremendous pleasure to announce when I am able to (couldn’t resist giving a teaser). So that sort of makes up for all the misery being inflicted upon my other projects.

The rest is more about putting food on the table. My wife’s company is in a bit of a jam with government regulators at the moment, so it’s not quite certain when she’ll be picking up a paycheck from them again. To fill the gap, I’ve taken on a bit of contract work that will take me away from most things D for a bit.

One of several non-programming gigs I’ve landed is proofreading a movie script being written in English by a Korean writer/director. He intends to shop it around Hollywood once it’s complete. Whether or not it goes anywhere, it’s still neat being able to get that close to a potential Hollywood project. I can’t give any details about it, but so far it’s looking like quite a fun script. I think it’s something I’d enjoy even if I saw it in a theater. But what do I know?

Much of the rest is rather mundane and boring, mostly proofreading or rewriting a variety of English documents written by Koreans. I’ll try to get back into my regular routine as soon as possible. Also, since I didn’t get around to putting together a Q & A for July, I intend to post two this month. I’ve got my eye on two candidates already, but have yet to ask them about it.

See you again when I can!

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MiniD 1.0

Jarrett Billingsley has released version 1.0 of MiniD. From the NG announcement:

MiniD is a scripting language written entirely in D, designed around D’s features and with D’s semantics in mind. It’s based mainly off of Lua and Squirrel, with influences from D and JavaScript.

MiniD is meant to be an extensible extension language, like Lua. That is, rather than trying to be a huge do-everything language like Python, it’s meant to be a smaller, more compact (but still expressive) language for writing programs and scripts meant to be run in the context of a larger program. It’s extensible in that the “host” program can provide functions and classes as hooks into application-specific functionality, and it’s an extension language in that it can be used to extend the capabilities of the host program.

MiniD makes it easy to interface between native and script code. The low-level API is muct simpler to use and cleaner than that of most languages implemented in C, and there is also a Pyd-like binding library to make it possible to quickly expose free functions and class types to MiniD.

He has been working on it for a while, so it’s great to see a 1.0 release. I plan to use MiniD myself in the very near future. Thanks, Jarrett!

Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, scripting languages, MiniD

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