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DConf 2026 in London

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Re: DConf 2026 in London

#61

Post by ntrel »

destructionator wrote: post #50
bayesnet wrote: post #26

What’s the status of the OpenD fork?[0] I see Adam is still active there but I’m not sure if it’s had any impact beyond losing him as an upstream contributor. [0]: https://opendlang.org/

Upstream has followed several of opend's innovations: we shipped interpolated expressions on day one of the fork (that was the straw that broke the camel's back) and then, after 7 years of procrastination, upstream also merged it a week later. We shipped extern(Objective-C) support, upstream backported it (and actually fixed enough bugs that I replaced my original impl with their's) a few months later. Upstream has t…

> the two bigger things I did they have talked about but probably won't do is i made the class monitor opt-in

https://dlang.org/changelog/pending.html#dmd.monitor-field

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#62

Post by WalterBright »

bw86 wrote: post #55
WalterBright wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Lithp a couple times, but it never caught on with me. I wouldn't know what the best techniques for Lithp error handling would be. I can never get past the ugly syntax.

You cannot be an expert in everything, that I understand. But the "I can never get past the ugly syntax." reason is unusually superficial from you. Understanding Lisp macros or CLOS (the very cool object system) or Conditions (which are like exceptions, but also different in a very interesting and powerful way) is totally worth enduring the syntax for a language designer. If you find the time, give it a try! Either w…

> reason is unusually superficial from you

I find the ((()))) aspect of it difficult to read, whereas the algebraic notation is easy. I've struggled with trying to read Lisp code for decades. It's a proverbial square peg that won't fit in the round hole.

A major aspect of D is the aesthetic look of the code. It's why I call D "elegant" as it just looks good on the screen. For example, this is how modules are imported:

    import foo;
Short and sweet. No syntactic noise.

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#63

Post by EvenThisAcronym »

destructionator wrote: post #50
bayesnet wrote: post #26

What’s the status of the OpenD fork?[0] I see Adam is still active there but I’m not sure if it’s had any impact beyond losing him as an upstream contributor. [0]: https://opendlang.org/

Upstream has followed several of opend's innovations: we shipped interpolated expressions on day one of the fork (that was the straw that broke the camel's back) and then, after 7 years of procrastination, upstream also merged it a week later. We shipped extern(Objective-C) support, upstream backported it (and actually fixed enough bugs that I replaced my original impl with their's) a few months later. Upstream has t…

> We merged the tuple destructuring PR (that was open for years again so the author was happy to get it to land somewhere!) and upstream followed there too.

FYI that had very little to do with OpenD merging the tuple syntax - at least from my perspective - Timon may feel differently. I was the one who got the ball rolling on the DIP for it and kept pushing the process forward, and I also helped Timon and Nick get it over the finish line by fixing an ICE in the backend caused by destructuring a tuple of structs.

I've wanted first class tuple syntax in D since 2013, and when Timon mentioned not having time to do a DIP for it, I offered to help. It would've happened regardless of whether it got merged into OpenD or not.

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#64

Post by destructionator »

ntrel wrote: post #61
destructionator wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upstream has followed several of opend's innovations: we shipped interpolated expressions on day one of the fork (that was the straw that broke the camel's back) and then, after 7 years of procrastination, upstream also merged it a week later. We shipped extern(Objective-C) support, upstream backported it (and actually fixed enough bugs that I replaced my original impl with their's) a few months later. Upstream has t…

> the two bigger things I did they have talked about but probably won't do is i made the class monitor opt-in https://dlang.org/changelog/pending.html#dmd.monitor-field

"custom druntimes" is not helpful for the vast, vast majority of programs.

but maybe this is the first step toward something more useful.

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#65

Post by Ferret7446 »

I came in here wondering why a config database is in London. It's quite unfortunate to name your conference after a much more popular, or at least widely used software (try searching dconf in a non personalized search engine)

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#66

Post by ntrel »

destructionator wrote: post #64
ntrel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the two bigger things I did they have talked about but probably won't do is i made the class monitor opt-in https://dlang.org/changelog/pending.html#dmd.monitor-field

"custom druntimes" is not helpful for the vast, vast majority of programs. but maybe this is the first step toward something more useful.

OK (I saw this but forgot), found: https://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-arsd/Blog.Posted_2025_09_2...

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#67

Post by Joker_vD »

zerr wrote: post #39
WalterBright wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, C and C++ still cannot compile this: int foo() { return bar(); } int bar() { return 3; }

Funny that C89/C90 would compile this specific example just fine due to implicit function declaration feature, which was deprecated in C99.

So much for "well, C started its life with a single-pass compiler, so it simply couldn't be made to work" justification, which makes it false in two ways: we actually have the sources of the original C compiler, and it was two-pass.

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#68

Post by swyx »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
LorenDB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume OP is asking if you would attend a DConf in San Francisco. By the way, big fan of D even though I don't get to use it much. Appreciate your work!

A San Francisco DConf would indeed be nice. We've done them in Silicon Valley before.

if you are interested, hello @ ai.engineer with your avaiability/expectations would be great, happy to dedicate some stuff to run it for u for free/cost (depending on the size)

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#69

Post by jdougan »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #40
WalterBright wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Lithp a couple times, but it never caught on with me. I wouldn't know what the best techniques for Lithp error handling would be. I can never get past the ugly syntax.

Error handling in Dylan[1] worked mostly the same way, if syntax is truly the issue. I posted a toy implementation in Lua a few years ago as well[2]. In general there’s nothing Lisp-specific about the idea, you just need dynamic scoping, closures that don’t outlive their parents, and a way to unwind the stack. Standard exception handling is: - Whenever an error happens, the program puts a description of it into an “e…

Smalltalk does something similar. Maybe that syntax would be better for him?

Re: DConf 2026 in London

#70

Post by vips7L »

michaelt wrote: post #35
nicoburns wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing about exceptions is that you can't tell from the type signature of a function whether it might throw one. So you have to hope it's documented, guess at whether try-catch is necessary, or reading through the entire call stack. I personally much prefer Rust style Result which also can't be ignored, and puts fallibili5y in the function signature.

> The worst thing about exceptions is that you can't tell from the type signature of a function whether it might throw one. In Java exceptions can be part of a method's declared type information, so handling is checked at compile time and IDEs can display the info. Unfortunately certain Java missteps made this design unpopular these days. For example, for many years new String(bytes, "UTF-8"); made it mandatory to ca…

Java's problem with checked exceptions is that they didn't add them fully to the type system (the lambda problem), and they never added any syntax sugar to make them easier to deal with. I really love checked exceptions and wish we could get some improvements.
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