This Week in D May 17, 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

20 bugs fixed
22 bugs and enhancement requests opened
59 pull requests merged into the language: 21 into DMD, 18 into Phobos, and 20 into druntime.
2 pull requests merged into the website.

Open D Jobs

A new page has been added to the D Wiki listing open D jobs. Take a look if you're interested, and add yours if you know of one that is available!

Major changes

std.typetuple was renamed to std.meta.

Destructors and postblits that handle child objects as well are now available to user code without complex workarounds which will aid manual memory management correctness.

In the community

DConf 2015

Monday is last day for DConf 2015 registrations - the conference is a little over one week away!

Community announcements

See more at digitalmars.D.announce.

Significant Forum Discussions

std.allocator.allocate(0) -> return null or std.allocator.allocate(1)? asks what allocating zero bytes should do. The decision is that it will return null, which is consistent with realloc(ptr, 0), which frees the memory pointed to.
DLL symbol identity continues to be discussed and can have major implications on D shared libraries in Windows. A decision has been reached: D DLLs will be changed on Windows to work more like they do on Linux, with consistent symbol identity, which will make casting and other operations across DLL boundaries work better.
D casually mentioned and dismissed + a suggestion led to a posting of D jobs on the wiki - making them easier to find than the ones posted to the announce forum or on This Week in D!
Let's improve D's exceptions discusses ways to fix enforce and make more specific details easily usable with exceptions. The code draft is here, written by me. Using reflection we can make more efficient, easier to use, exceptions with better error messages. I intend to try to get it in druntime, but failing that, my module will still be usable.

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

Tip of the week

Quick tip this week, but one I didn't know myself! Courtesy of Stack Overflow.

If you want a raw byte-by-byte range of a file, the easiest way is to do file.byChunk(arbitrary_chunk_size).joiner. To use this, import std.stdio, std.algorithm;.

My answer to that question also shows other ways to get ranges, but the joiner is the main one - it puts the various chunks together into one range of bytes, where you can fetch them individually.

joiner is documented here and can be used in a variety of cases.

Find more D tips at the D idioms list or buy my D Cookbook for a more in-depth examination of many D tricks.

If you'd like to submit a tip, email me.

Upcoming events

DConf 2015 will be starting on May 27 in Orem, Utah, United States. Just two weeks away!

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