larsivi

I'm to some degree active on LinkedIn and my answer to a question there led to the quotes that can be found in this article. Although the name isn't mentioned, my quotes are all taken from my work on Tango.

The article is about how easy/difficult it is to write/use open source software on Macs. Although I am fully behind my quotes there, she did leave out the ones that weren't so negative.

After the previous post on the topic, I have received quite a few followers on Twitter (15?) and 2 on Ohloh. I guess this means that I will use Twitter most, but I may duplicate what I consider important D/Tango messages to Ohloh, just to make it appear somewhat active there too (The Ohloh page takes its time updating the stats, so it gets kinda static without some other activity).

As for the Hackontest competition, they will start the selection process on August 1st. Apparently only 6 projects fulfill the requirements and are thus eligable. Tango isn't one of them, but is pretty close (missing one implementor).

Seems like it isn't all to long since last time I wrote about the D compilers - then about quality. This time I'd like to write about DMD's release process, as it is highly frustrating for me trying to have Tango compile with it.

Almost every release sees a regression, or some obscure accepts-invalid bug getting fixed in what is meant to be the stable branch. Today DMD 1.032 was released, with at least 3 issues causing immediate harm to Tango. One I made go away in SVN, but I'm considering reverting, and just calling 1.032 broken. The last 2 issues I don't know how they affect Tango yet. Actually, there may even be more that I just didn't get to yet.

I recently got my self a twitter account, and not very surprisingly you can find it at http://twitter.com/larsivi. The reasoning behind the move is that I don't want to post too much low quality content to this blog, and thus I end up seldomly really having to time to write here. With twitter I can make short notes and anecdotes without worrying about quality.

I'm not normally interested in the daily dealings of all people around the world, but see Twitter as an easy way to post thoughts around the open source work I do, and a bit of software development in general. Considering this, I think I find Ohloh's journals a better idea (or a better match towards what I want), but I'm not sure many enough of the D users use Ohloh to make the feature work for me. Also, Twitter could spread the "word" wider, although I guess the "word" would be considered less interesting to most potential readers.

I don't normally bother (or have time for) the various programming competitions on the net. This one caught my eye however, as I find the Tango implementation fairly short and elegant (the one that prompted my attention was in F# and wasn't particularly readable IMO, but then I'm not really into functional programming).

The task (see here to get your instance) is to process a directory tree (provided from Google in a zip file), and sum up values on certain lines of certain files.

My instance told me to sum values on line 5 in files with extension ".js" and with "BCD" somewhere in the path and multiply that with the sum of the values on line 1 in files with extension ".txt" and with "zzz" somewhere in the path. Empty lines should not be counted (I probably misunderstood something as an empty line would only have yielded a zero value for the sum in any case, but I got the correct result according to Google).

A few weeks ago, I entered Tango as a project for the Hackontest - a 24 hour hacking contest for 3 select features for various open source projects. The hacking will be done by teams of 3. For those attending, there will be cash prizes and most likely an exciting trip to Zurich, Switzerland.

Now, the catch is that a jury will select the 3 projects/features that will be part of the competition proper, and these will be chosen from those entered at the site linked further up.

When I registered Tango, there was a

A recurring complaint against D, is the quality of the compilers. Currently there are two in a usable state - DMD and GDC, with LLVMDC, Dil and Dang as follow ups.

This post is about the first two, as I don't consider a D compiler usable until it can compile Tango and its examples.

DMD is quite stable, especially its 1.0x branch - but the most annoying bugs - those that it is hardest to find workarounds for - tend to have a low priority. The reasoning seems mostly to be that the fruits are hanging to high. Also, it does have fairly unstable optimization - while developing Tango XML, just moving a function in the source could

KeYeR (Piotr) called upon me in #D and said that my statement "This is one of the worse decisions among the bad ones in the D history." was bad English. No, not really. He said that it was a strong statement, and sure, it is. I tend to be (unnecessarily so?) strong in my rather few statements on design choices in the D language. Peter added that he was afraid that I was right.

As I see it, Walter here is willingly implementing a solution that 99% of the community seems to hate. He even had a different implementation, the manifest keyword, that was applauded

When I talked about the three T's, the last one stood for TODO. Well, in the Tango world, i probably should have made that Ticket. Since our latest release, the reactions have been relaxed, mostly due to the holidays I guess (and partially because the contents were well known). Only 9 tickets have been created since then, and at least 5 of them were web and documentation related. The web part is natural, as I redid the layout of the Tango frontpage, hopefully for the much better (at least visually, I believe we could do it in a more proper styles based manner, please join us if you think so). I think the tickets related to this change were all resolved.

As for the docs, one ticket was about private members in the DDoc output. Now, this is easily removed by changing the style of the source code comments, but do anyone know if this is

What is it with this guy and letters lately? Well, M has a prominent position in my life these days, considering it's the first in my son's name, something we hear a lot about him recently turning 4. In this post, it's all about a Norwegian comic though.

M is named after its creator, Mads Eriksen, and is semi biographical. Although it would be a rather insane