Archive for January, 2008

DMD 1.025 and 2.009

Monday, January 7th, 2008

On Jan 1, Walter announced DMD 1.025 and 2.009. The former contains a handful of bugfixes. In addition to bugfixes, the latter got another overhaul of const/invariant semantics and an extension of enums that allows them to be used for declaring manifest constants.

Rememeber, the 1.x series is stable and is the version you probably should be using for production work. The 2.x series is experimental and frequently sees breaking changes.

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Tango 0.99.4 Frank and Updated Tangobos

Monday, January 7th, 2008

On Dec 21 the Tango team announced a new release, 0.99.4 Frank. The release is named for Frank Benoit who put a lot of effort into filling Tango’s documentation gaps. There were several changes and bugfixes, some of whic break existing code. From the NG announcement:

* toUtf8 is now toString
* tango.util.time moved to tango.time
* Major reorganization of much of the time package itself, thanks to Steven
Schveighoffer
* Updated for DMD 1.024
* Destructors are now thread safe
* Zip archive for independent use, or for mounting in VFS, courtesy of
Daniel Keep
* Addition of TempFile, also Daniel Keep

The complete changelog is available online.

Additionally, the Tango/Phobos compatibility library, Tangobos, was updated to this new Tango release. It’s also available in the Tango DMD packages.

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News Roundup

Monday, January 7th, 2008

If you follow d.D.announce you’ll already know that there have been a handful of announcements over the past few weeks. For the rest of you, I’ll cover the majority of them here and put a couple in separate posts. Let’s get started.

Way back on Dec 19, fltk4d 0.4 was released. This is a D binding to the Fast Light Toolkit GUI library.

On Dec 21, Gregor announced DSSS 0.74. See the NG announcement for the changelog.

Kuan Hsu gave everyone a Christmas present when he released an open source Tetris clone he put together in D. More D games, please!

Dec 26 saw the announcement of Kong, a code hooking library and executable parser, by Neal Alexander.

Nicolay Korslund released two versions of the open source game scripting language, Monster, on Dec 22 and 31.

On Dec 30, bobef announced the flowerd toolkit. It’s a collection of handy code that he has made available to all. There’s some nifty stuff in there. I’m particularly interested in exploring HTMLayout.

Finally, congratulations to Chris of Inventive Dingo. His D game, Mayhem Intergalactic, won a spot in the Student Showcase of the Student Competition for the 10th Annual Independent Games Festival. This means the game is up for the Best Student Game prize to be announced at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Great news for Chris and big exposure for D.

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Learn to Tango with D: Update

Friday, January 4th, 2008

I’ve received confirmation from Apress that ‘Learn to Tango with D’ is scheduled to be released on Jan 28. The ebook version should be available on Jan 7 unless something crops up to prevent that. We authors recently received the final PDF version of the book and are giving it a going over to make last minute corrections. That could potentially affect the release date of the ebook version. I’ll be sure to let you know if it does.

The Amazon page still has not been updated with the current book description and correct author bios, though the publisher did inform me that the changes were submitted. The correct info is online at the publisher’s site, however.

The book weighs in at 188 pages. The foreword is by Walter Bright, followed by the following 8 chapters (this is a condensed TOC that only nests one level–the full TOC goes deeper):

  1. First Steps
    • Hello World
    • Source Modules
    • Package, Import, and Symbol Visibility
    • Installation
    • Compilation Tools

  2. D Fundamentals
    • Declarations
    • Pointers
    • Arrays
    • Flow Control
    • Functions
    • Error Handling

  3. D’s Object-Oriented Features
    • Modules
    • Structs and Unions
    • Classes
    • Interfaces

  4. Procedural Lifetime
    • D Language Type Classifications
    • Scope and Lifetime
    • Storage Classes
    • Static Constructors
    • Lifetime Characteristics of Modules
    • Lifetime Characteristics of Functions
    • Garbage Collection

  5. Templates
    • The Problem of Insufficient Information
    • Type Templates
    • Function Templates
    • Template Specialization
    • Template Metaprogramming
    • Compile-Time Function Evaluation

  6. Text Processing
    • String-Manipulation Utilities
    • Text Class
    • Numeric Conversion
    • Layout and Formatting

  7. Input and Output
    • Console I/O
    • Stream I/O
    • Network I/O
    • File Handling

  8. The Other Packages
    • The Package Rundown
    • Threads and Fibers
    • Collections
    • Logging
    • And That’s Not All!

The first five chapters cover the language and chapters 6-8 focus on Tango.

I’ll post any more updates as I get them.

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Happy New Year

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Happy New Year D-Land! I hope everyone has had a safe and happy time through the holiday season. I’ll be back to posting D-news and updates Real Soon Now. Good luck with any New Year resolutions you may have!