News Roundup

There was a short burst of announcements in the D newsgroups at the end of last week, consisting of new releases for 2 IDE projects and 2 GUI projects. Here’s a recap, since I wasn’t on top of them when they were announced.

First up, Rainer announced a new version of Visual D. This release, 0.3.26, includes several fixes and improvements.

* fixed regression in last version: single file compilation did not build any d files
* single file compilation: avoid relinking every time
* separate compile and link: no longer trashes dependencies in link step
* goto definition, search symbol: now line number adjusted according to changes since last successful build
* fix: resource files in sub folders would not build because the same folders were expected in the intermediate directory
* global settings: split page into directories/settings pages to make option “Show build time” accessible
* global settings: added option to disable sorting projects
* parser now accepts “do {} while(condition)” without trailing ‘;’
* project options macro $(PROJECTNAME) now uses the name in the solution instead of the project file name
* fixed bad indentation of first contract
* fixed colorization of first token after debug condition without arguments
* “is” now always colored as operator, not as keyword
* updated to build with dmd 2.055beta

Also on the IDE front, Bruno has released version 0.5.0 of the Eclipse plugin, DDT (changelog here). If you plan to update, here’s some important info from the announcement:

This new release requires DLTK 3.0 (from Indigo), so if you are going for the upgrade path, you need to add the new DLTK update site:
http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo

In GUI news, Anders resurfaced to announce version 0.16 of wxD, his bindings to the wxWidgets library.

Fixed building with LDC 0.9.2 and DMD 2.054
Allow building with wxWidgets 2.9.2 / Cocoa
Tested with GDC/LDC/DMD 1.064 on 3 platforms

Mostly a bugfix update, allowing 64-bit builds
on Win/GNU/Mac – except for DMD

A couple of days later, Mike Wey announced version 1.5 of GtkD.

* wraps GTK+ 2.22.x series api (and relative libraries: glib, cairo, pango, etc.)
* Improved memory management.
* Implements GtkBuildable.
* Brought Gstreamer up to date with the rest of the bindings, including 64bits support.

DDT 0.4.2

Don’t know how I overlooked this, but last weekend Bruno announced a new release of DDT, the D plugin for Eclipse. Add the followingURL for the update site in Eclipse and you’ll get the latest and greatest:

http://ddt.eclipselabs.org.codespot.com/hg.updates/

Also, the DDT forum has moved from DSource to Google groups at http://groups.google.com/group/ddt-ide.

== DDT 0.4.2 (2011-04-29) ==
* Fixed #33, bug with spaces in projects names: made all variables in DMD response file resolve to quote escaped values.
* Fixed bug where all D comments where considered DDoc comments for documentation hover.
* Fixed limitation where problem hovers where not more prioritary than documentation hovers.
* Fixed #37: F2 always brings up empty documentation hover.
* Fixed #38: autocomplete crashing / very slow. (Content Assist takes very long to show up when many completion options are available)
* Added support for editor code templates in Content Assist.
* Fixed bug in cast expression, where the cast type reference was ignored by the parser/semantic-engine;
* Fixed bug where DDoc comments where not associated with the corresponding symbol definition if that definition had protection, storage, linkage, or certain other kinds of attributes;
* Implemented #35: format immutable keyword and @annotations.
* Added (nothrow, pure, shared, immutable) keywords to syntax coloring
* Added @annotations to syntax coloring (spaces after @ not supported, any identifier accepted)
* Changed syntax coloring example in preferences
* Fixed minor Content Assist bug where completions would not appear when requested on certain syntax errors.