D for the 21st Century: Moving fast without breaking things

Átila Neves
Nov 20, 14:00 UTC

Slides (PPTX) Video Q & A

This talk is a brain dump from Átila on his view of the future of D. He believes that D needs to change, and that it's vital that backwards compatibility be maintained as much as possible. In the process, he outlines some of the major issues D programmers face, shares some thoughts on what's stalling progress, and what some possible future changes could look like (these possible changes are based on his personal opinions, and are not necessarily reflective of any current plans or strategy in his role as a co-maintainer of the language).

On another level, this talk is a call to action for the D community. We have an awesome language that we all would love to be awesomer, but we need a group effort if we want to get there. In the meantime, there's a lot of material here for the post-talk Q & A session, and Átila is eager to answer your questions!

Átila Neves has a PhD in Particle Physics for research done at CERN. Most of the time spent there required programming in C++, with a two-year stint as a Perl programmer on the IT department's security team. He also worked for Cisco for almost seven years, developing networking software in C and C++ and leading his teams in the areas of software quality and testing. He now works as a D consultant/programmer for Symmetry Investments, as well as being the deputy maintainer of the D programming language. He spends his spare time yelling at the screen in frustration while waiting for computers to compile his code.

Fast and Coherent Reflection

Stefan Koch
Nov 20, 15:15 UTC

Video Q & A

The D programming language provides a number of compile-time traits, both in the form of built-ins and a standard library API, that D users can employ in reflecting over their code. But is there a better way?

In this talk, Stefan will talk about his latest project, core.reflect, a package aimed at making reflection in D more efficient and more coherent by unifying the myriad compile-time traits we currently have in D. The talk will provide a basic overview of the package, describe Stefan's goals for the project, and explain what is currently blocking its completion.

Stefan has been programming in D personally and professionally since 2013. He has taken a special interest in the performance of D’s compile-time features and has been contibuting to DMD for over four years. He has presented either a full talk or a lightning talk at three real-world DConfs, and this is his second DConf Online talk.

Life Outside the Big 4: The Adventure of D on OpenBSD

Brian Callahan
Nov 20, 16:30 UTC

Slides (PDF) Video Q & A

For those of us on systems not officially supported by the D Language Foundation (anything other than FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS, Windows), getting up and running with a D compiler on your platform of choice can be a little difficult. Which compiler do I choose? How do I port DRuntime? What about the unique features of my operating system? How do I get help with all this? How do I reduce my maintenance burden over time? Will anyone even care?

The journey of D from pie-in-the-sky to a package officially offered in the OpenBSD package repository serves as a model story for other platforms who want to offer D to their userbase. We will walk through the many interconnected parts required to get a D package on OpenBSD, what the future is like for D outside the Big 4, how you can get started with D on your platform, and how those of us who enjoy life outside the Big 4 can be a positive force for D and the D community.

Brian Callahan is a professor in the Information Technology & Web Science program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His research and teaching focuses on cybersecurity, web science, and the digital humanities. Brian has been an OpenBSD developer since 2013, where he has a long-standing project to port and package every compiler in existence for OpenBSD. He is known in the D community for once having written a popular blog post about getting GDC working on OpenBSD, and for writing a blog series on how to write a Z80 assembler in D.

Metaprogramming in D

Bradley Chatha
Nov 20, 17:45 UTC

Slides (ODP) Video Q & A

D's large array of metaprogramming features can be quite overwhelming, so Bradley has picked out a few usage examples to spark a few ideas in beginning D programmers trying to find their way.

This talk starts off with a brief overview of templates, then goes on to demonstrate progressively more advanced metaprogramming featurees. Topics covered include Compile Time Function Excecution (CTFE), User Defined Attributes (UDA), traits, static foreach, and more. At the end of the talk, Bradley highlights examples of real-world D projects that make heavy use of metaprogramming.

Bradley has been programming as a hobby since 2012. He choose D as his main language due to its expressiveness and amazing metaprogramming abilities. He has written several meta-heavy libraries and can't live without D's compile-time features. This is his first public talk.

Livecoding Session

Adam D. Ruppe
Nov 20, 19:00 UTC

Livestream

Adam is back for another livecoding session to demonstrate his arsd D libraries and his personal development process. This year, he intends to continue developing the project he worked on in his DConf Online 2020 livecoding session, a multiplayer online game that runs natively on Windows, Linux, and WebAssembly from the same source.

Adam has been a D user for over thirteen years, known as a frequent participant in D chats, the primary creator of the arsd all-purpose library collection, and the author of the D Cookbook. This is his second livecoding session for DConf Online.

Great Programming with ImportC

Walter Bright
Nov 21, 14:00 UTC

Slides (PDF) Video Q & A

The D programming language is designed to have a zero-cost interface to C, but D still needs the corresponding C declarations to be written in D in order for the D compiler to access them. While this is very easy and straightforward, hand-translating 10,000+ lines of C header files gets very tedious very quickly. Mechanical translation of C headers to D has had only limited success.

The ideal is for it to “just work”. The only solid way to get D code to import C declarations is for the D compiler to be able to compile C code directly.

Walter has dismissed this approach as unworkable in the past. But the more he thought about, the more he realized he could make it work. After all, he's written a C99 compiler before. He knows how to do it. Piece of cake, right? Walter will talk about the journey of ImportC from inspiration to working implementation. And he would like to thank Iain Buclaw for his invaluable help with ImportC!

Walter Bright is the creator and first implementer of the D programming language and has implemented compilers for several other languages. He's an expert in all areas of compiler technology, including front ends, optimizers, code generation, interpreter engines, and runtime libraries. Walter regularly writes articles about compilers and programming, is known for engaging and informative presentations, and provides training in compiler development techniques. Many are surprised to discover that Walter is also the creator of the wargame Empire, which is still popular today over 30 years after its debut.

A Deep Dive into GPU Text Rendering

Elijah Stone
Nov 21, 15:15 UTC

Video Q & A

This talk covers the primitives used to represent glyphs, a bit of linear algebra, how to rasterize those glyphs, and then how to do it on the GPU. No graphics knowledge necessary. Code examples in D!

Elijah is a self-taught programmer who first discovered D while looking for a better language than C++ for game development. Graphics programming is somethinghe's always found interesting (though he doesn't know it nearly well enough!) because of the somewhat rigid programming model it forces upon you, and the performance you get as a result.

GraphQL for D: Do the Boring Things

Robert Schadek
Nov 21, 16:30 UTC

Slides (PDF) Video Q & A

GraphQL is a statically typed query language that is slowly supplanting REST. This talk will focus on D's server implementation.

graphql-d is an implementation of a GraphQL server. The server receives a GraphQL query and eventually returns JSON. A lot has to happen in between: lexing, parsing, and validating the query is the easy part of this process. How to turn the validated query into JSON with graphql-d, a.k.a. the boring things, will be explained in this presentation.

Robert Schadek received a master's degree in computer science at the University of Oldenburg. His master's thesis was titled “DMCD A Distributed Multithreading Caching D Compiler” and introduced multi-threading, among other optimizations, to the compiler control flow. He was a computer science PhD student from 2012–2018 at the University of Oldenburg. His PhD research focused on quorum systems in combination with graphs. Since 2018 he has been happily using D in his day job working for Symmetry Investments

The How and Why of Profiling D Code

Max Haughton
Nov 21, 17:45 UTC

Slides (PDF) Video Q & A

Max thinks profiling is often badly done, so he wants to provide jumping-off points for people looking for various levels of detail as to what to do. He will include some detail on how processors actually work, partly because it's relevant, but mostly because it's interesting.

This talk will cover the basics of how to use a profiler and will go in deep on a small section of code and discuss why it performs the way it does. In the the course of the talk, Max will touch on performance-related topics, e.g, memory access and management.

Max Haughton is a Physics student currently moonlighting as a D programmer for Symmetry Investments. He also works on various aspects of D and is affiliated with the D Language Foundation.

Livestream: Ask Us Anything!

Walter Bright, Átila Neves, and Razvan Nitu
Nov 21, 19:00 UTC

Video

DConf wouldn't be DConf, online or otherwise, without the “Ask Us Anything!” tradition, where the language maintainers step onto the stage to answer any and all questions from the audience. Last year's edition ran just over an hour and covered a variety of topics. This year, we can run as long as we need to since it's the last event on the schedule.

This year, we're breaking tradition a bit and bringing a third person into the mix. Razvan Nitu started working this year as the D Language Foundation's Pull Request and Issue Manager. He has agreed to join in and take any questions that come his way. And rumor has it that Walter will have a camera this time, so he won't be a disembodied voice like last time. Bring your best queries and show Razvan just how much fun the DConf AUA can be!