This Week in D
June 19, 2016
Welcome to This Week in D! Each week, we'll summarize what's been going on in the D community and write brief advice columns to help you get the most out of the D Programming Language.
The D Programming Language is a general purpose programming language that offers modern convenience, modeling power, and native efficiency with a familiar C-style syntax.
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This Week in D is edited by Adam D. Ruppe. Contact me with any questions, comments, or contributions.
Statistics
- 13 bugs fixed
- 15 bugs and enhancement requests opened
- 43 pull requests merged into the language: 17 into DMD, 23 into Phobos, and 3 into druntime.
- 16 pull requests merged into the website.
In the community
Community announcements
- D Programmers in Colombia?
- std.experimental.checkedint is ready for comments!
- Work in Amsterdam
- pure D JPEG decoder, with progressive JPEG support, public domain
- pure D jpeg encoder, public domain
- D-Man culture
- July D Boston Meetup gathering
See more at the announce forum.
Tip of the Week
I did some minor changes to my png.d this week that caused a major reduction in memory usage: changing temporary allocations to reuse a manual buffer and free it when I'm done with it.
Another part was transitioning away from std.zlib and using the C interface, etc.c.zlib instead. std.zlib (which has been mentioned before in these tips) allocates a lot of temporaries without cleaning up after them.
Temporary allocations tend to be cleaned up eventually, but since they are local to your function, they are really easy to manage with a simple scope(exit) free(memory);, so the cost to the programmer is very low for the benefit.
png.d cut its memory usage down to about 1/3 of what it was with just a couple simple scoped lifetime memory frees.
Learn more about D
To learn more about D and what's happening in D:
- Read http://dlang.org and the D wiki.
- Want in-depth material? Check out the Books on D.
- Join us on IRC: channel #d on irc.freenode.net.
- Check out the forums (TIP - check out the NNTP and mailing list links under "Also via" on the forum to subscribe to email updates or access the forum with a newsgroup client!)
- Follow D Programming on Twitter
- search for #dlang on Twitter
- and/or follow This Week in D's editor on Twitter.
- Check out the D tag on Stack Overflow