This Week in D July 26, 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.

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

Statistics

6 bugs fixed
18 bugs and enhancement requests opened
30 pull requests merged into the language: 11 into DMD, 14 into Phobos, and 5 into druntime.
4 pull requests merged into the website.

New Beta and TWO new books!

Beta D 2.068.0-b2 was released this week, use the beta, file bugs to make a more stable relase.

We also got two books announced about D: "Learning D" is available for pre-order, as well as "D Web Development". Both are coming from Packt Publishing, the same as my own "D Cookbook".

Open D Jobs

A jobs page is the D Wiki. Take a look if you're interested, and add yours if you know of one that is available!

In the community

Community announcements

See more at digitalmars.D.announce.

Significant Forum Discussions

By far, the most significant discussion on the forums last week was Rant after trying Rust a bit - a discussion that started with just a list of features the OP liked in Rust, but quickly shifted course into a traits and concepts vs template constraint argument.

Both sides seemed frustrated that the other side wasn't listening to them, with the traits/concepts (it was also pointed out that they aren't actually the same thing, but the argument kept mixing the ideas together) side accusing the constraint side as not learning the lesson from dynamic languages and the constraint/duck type side accusing the other side as not seeing the compile-time benefits of unit tests and for shipping untested code.

Both sides made a number of fair points - reading coverage output is difficult for a large library and a library's user is another developer, so while it is a compile time check for them, it is still analogous to runtime for the library author. Similarly, the traits or concepts can explode in complexity for many tasks (this was the topic of Andrei's DConf talk too, see a few issues ago for a summary and video link for that).

It is unlikely much will change in D as a result of this argument, but skimming it may teach you useful tips to mitigate the problems each side sees.

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