This Week in D April 19, 2015

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.

This Week in D has an RSS feed.

This Week in D is edited by Adam D. Ruppe. Contact me with any questions, comments, or contributions.

Statistics

24 bugs fixed
20 bugs and enhancement requests opened
39 pull requests merged into the language: 16 into DMD, 14 into Phobos, and 9 into druntime.
0 pull requests merged into the website.

D Job Opening

EMSI, a company based in Moscow, Idaho, is looking to hire a D language software engineer. Learn more and apply here.

In the community

Upcoming events

A Silicon Valley D Meetup is scheduled for April 23, 2015.

[hackathon] One week left to the first D Hackathon, an event where D contributors are encouraged to write as much code as they can in a week with little extra forum discussion. All are welcome to participate, including remotely.

Community announcements

See more at digitalmars.D.announce.

Significant Forum Discussions

Pitching an investment bank on using D for their bond analytics discussed D's pros an cons and techniques to convince managers to give it a try.
Today's programming challenge - How's your Range-Fu ? asked forumgoers to try to rewrite one of Phobos' functions, std.string.wrap, to use a range interface instead of eagerly allocated strings. This is part of a push to make as much of Phobos allocation (and thus garbage collection) free.
DIP76: Autodecode Should Not Throw is a slightly old thread from earlier in the month, but still ongoing. The question is what Phobos should do about UTF - will it autodecode multibyte codepoints and if so, will it throw an exception on badly formed UTF-8 or replace them with invalid character codepoints (which are valid Unicode chars that represent unknown characters - permitted according to the standard). There's no conclusion yet. The status quo thus remains: Phobos auto-decodes UTF-8 and UTF-16, yielding dchars when given strings, and will throw an exception if it has poorly formed utf-8.
How D could gain more traction? discusses batteries-included standard library and other adoption issues.

See more at forum.dlang.org and keep up with community blogs at Planet D.

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.
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