Rewriting Optlink
Walter is in the process of translating the venerable, and sometimes cranky, optlink from assembler to C. The process has already led to one bugfix in the version shipped with the latest DMD releases. And now, he has a blog post up explaining how he's doing it. A brief, but interesting, read.
RuDy at Euruko
Tomasz Stachewicz is presenting RuDy, his project allowing Ruby extensions to be written in D, at this year's Euruko over the coming weekend. He has a blog post up about the talk and his work on RuDy so far, for the curious.
News Roundup
Finally, I have the time to sit down and knock up a post with a number of D news items I've failed to report over the past couple of weeks. If you've made an announcement in the NG or elsewhere and I fail to mention it here, I promise it's not intentional!
First, let's start with the dstats library. This project "attempts to provide some basic (and some not-so-basic) statistics functionality as a plain old library on top of D, as well as a bunch of utility code useful for implementing higher level statistical functionality." dsimcha announced that it was recently updated to make use of the new Phobos features introduced in DMD 2.029, such as ranges.
dsimcha also made available the RangeExtra module. It's a collection of ranges missing from the new Phobos, some of which might find their way into a future Phobos release. A documentation page and the source module are available under the Phobos license or BSD.
And there's still more from dsimcha. In the SVN trunk for dstats, you'll find a file named random.d. This is a port to D of the NumPy random number generators.
Moritz Warning announced a new version of Web-GMUI, which is "a remote web interface for MLDonkey, aMule, rTorrent, Transmission and giFT." This new release includes numerous bugfixes and an Italian translation.
Moritz also announced that he ported one of Kenta Cho's awesome little shooters, Titanion, to use Tango and Derelict. The original was written against Phobos using bindings from D-porting. Visit the Titanion project page at Sourceforge for more on the port.
Clay Smith managed to get h3r3tic's Hybrid GUI working on top of his ArcLib. You can read about it on Clay's blog.
Leandro Lucarella posted about his Naive Garbage Collector implementation. Read more about it and follow links of interest on his blog.
Uwe Keller announced the release of Evanescent v0.1. It's "a collection of tools for reasoning in propositional logic and provides implementations of inference engines in the D programming language." The project is hosted with Google Code, but also has a prescence at DSource.
Frank Fischer announced a completely rewritten version of LYLA, "a matrix and linear-algebra library for large scale matrices."
Steve Teale has updated the DCat web application server to build with both DMD 1.043 and 2.029.
And the last bit of news for this roundup: Mike Wey has announced GtkD 1.2.
Bartosz on Multithreading D
Bartosz Milewski has a blog post up on the concepts underlying the design of D's new multitheading paradigm. It's a great read for those wondering where D2 is going, particularly if you've seen all the hubub over pure, immutable, const, SafeD, and the other things that make D2 a different language from D1. One thing that stood out for me was this bit:
D’s support for message passing will be library-based. The race-free type system will make it safe and flexible. It will, for instance, support passing messages not only by value but also by reference–without sacrificing safety.
I hadn't even considered that there would be a message passing API. I assume, when he says it will be library-based, that he means it will be part of Phobos and not left up to a third party. You see, I'm crazy about messages. For certain types of applications, building a system around message passing can be a huge convenience, opening the door to all sorts of flexibility. And when coupled with a dynamic component based system... Give me dynamic class loading on par with Java and I'll have found my Nirvana.
On a side note, I'm well behind with D news. I'm a bit zonked right now, so I'll get a roundup posted after a good night's sleep and I finish teaching my early morning class tomorrow (which will still be today for most of you).
Profiling with DMD
Sergey Gromov has kicked off a series Profiling with Digital Mars D Compiler on Windows. The first post explains the process, including how to make use of the files produced when profiling. The next post will put this info to practical use through profilling Blaze. If you've never profiled your D code before, Sergey's blog is now a good place to learn how.