larsivi

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

Which Ts are these? Well, lets start with the first, Time. Just a lame excuse to why I haven't written anything here for a long time. I've had precious little time for this blog lately. Time has been spent on non-D work, moving, refurbishing a kitchen, writing a book. And the latter is probably a major reason, writing books seems to zap a lot of writing power, making for a sad blogging statistics. We're highly

We just released the next version of Tango, 0.99.1, which is mostly a bugfix release. To the Tango team, events surrounding it are encouraging though, as they show that Tango gains more users and more compatible libraries.

In addition to the compression stream filters by Daniel Keep, many of the bugfixes in this release, were due to patches and suggestions by users. As such, one bug in the collections package was reported 4 times over a

From time to time, Walter says that we need to do things that will increase the visibility of D outside of the D community. Each little effort is in itself probably too small for a noticable effect, but over time and with many such efforts, we make a difference.

I try to take every opportunity, both because I want D to succeed, but also because I want to succeed in having D programming as my main source of income. Of course, when I discuss and plug D, I usally