This Week in D March 29, 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

31 bugs fixed
36 bugs and enhancement requests opened
65 pull requests merged into the language: 26 into DMD, 32 into Phobos, and 7 into druntime .
17 pull requests merged into the website.

Major Changes

D 2.067.0 has been released!

A change not listed on the changelog but nevertheless new and useful is that DDoc now supports backtick code, like in GitHub, StackOverflow, and other sites. For example: `code here` inside a ddoc comment. This does two things: it escapes the characters in the block and then wraps it in a DDOC_BACKQUOTED macro. By default, this macro expands to inline code style.

/// You can now write `<span>stuff like this</span>` in DDoc!
void example() {}

The escaping makes this more than just syntax sugar: it is a new feature that makes documenting functions that handle HTML much easier, since you can write `<li>` without the <li> tag being passed straight through to the output.

If you need to write a pair of backticks on a single line, you should use the BACKTICK macro. A backtick on a line without a closing pair is still passed through unmodified, so lines like `text', e.g. ld's output, can be written literally.

Other changes with examples can be seen in the changelog.

This release was fully managed by the new release czar, Martin Nowak, using a new process. The download page, as you'll see on the link, includes several packaged variants.

In the community

DConf 2015

The schedule for DConf 2015 was announced this week. The selected talks are varied and include low level discussions, high level code presentations, case studies from business users, and more over three days.

See the schedule for details.

Community announcements

See more at digitalmars.D.announce.

Significant Forum Discussions

Gary Willoughby: "Why Go's design is a disservice to intelligent programmers" sparked an enormous thread on both Reddit and the D forums. It discusses goroutines in D, language complexity trade offs, and the optics of language flamewars, among many other topics.
DMD compilation speed discusses the slowing compiler with many releases. It is a constant fight to maintain dmd's performance, slowness creeps in, then it is optimized again, and the cycle continues. This thread discusses ways to stabilize the situation.
Class Hierarchy Graphs discusses automatically making code layout visualizations from source.
Why doesn't D check null pointers is a frequently asked question answered once again. The answer is that runtime null checks can harm performance and compile time checks are considered too intrusive of a change at this point. Moreover, the most common use cases of null checks: debugging and making servers that don't die with buggy code, both have alternatives: debugging can be done with core dumps and reliable servers or other plugin related code are MUCH better served by process separation. Attempting to continue running after a segfault may lead to memory corruption and unpredictable results, even if you did catch the exception.
Human unreadable documentation - the ugly seam between simple D and complex D discusses how the documentation for Phobos make D look a lot harder to use than it really is.

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

Upcoming events

DConf 2015 will be starting on May 27 in Orem, Utah, United States

Learn more about D

To learn more about D and what's happening in D:

Read http://dlang.org and the D wiki.
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