The One With D News and Opinions of the Digital Mars D Programming Language

Yet Another News Roundup

Once again, I've fallen way behind on D news. For a while, it was a bit dry. Then in the past few weeks a few announcements came and I kept putting off reposting them here. So, here's some of the stuff I've not blogged recently.

LDC has been accepted into the Fedora 14 official repository, so if that's your Linux flavor of choice you'll be able to use it quite easily. The package maintainer, Jonathan Mercier, also has packages for Tango and Derelict. Both of those are under review for inclusion in the official repo. I'm sure he'll let us know the result.

Speaking of Derelict, I've just given the build system another overhaul. You can now use the makefiles to compile with either DMD or LDC by specifying DC=dmd/ldc when executing make (e.g. 'make -flinux.mak DC=ldc').

David Simcha has evolved a neat little plotting package, now called Plot2Kill (formerly dflplot). The project, currently in alpha, is described as "capable of drawing basic scientific and statistical plots, including bar graphs, line graphs, histograms, scatter plots, heat maps, quantile-quantile plots, and ROC curves."

awishformore has released a binding/wrapper for SQLlite 3.6. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have provided a page about the project, only a direct download link. Normally, I don't like linking directly from here, but once again I'll make an exception. Here's a link to sqlite4d.rar. Currently supports D2 only.

FreepingCreature has announced FCC, a "simple compiled C-like language with a compiler written in D." Again, there's no project page, but there is a git repository that you can browse. Looks like it'd be fun to play with, but I don't see any information about the license.

Nick Sabalausky has announced Goldie 0.3, an engine for the Gold Parser Builder that supports D1/Tango. He says D2 support is planned for the future.

Jacob Carlborg has announced the initial release of Orange, a Boost-licensed serialization library that supports D1/D2, Phobos/Tango (I know what a headache that can be). The architecture is split into a front-end (the serializer) and a back-end (the archiver) so that you can implement custom archive formats.

On a side note, gone are the days when you could be content with just having Subversion installed for your D development. There are three different source control tools used in the projects above (svn, git and mercurial). So if you plan to use any of them in earnest, make sure you're up to speed on the ones you aren't familiar with. Personally, I'm still slow with git and hg.