Walter and I talk about D in Romania

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 5 October 2015 at 14:10:43 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> Not going to miss this opportunity!

Since I was apparently the only forum regular in the audience, 
figured I should post a follow-up.

First, the event was recorded. There was a professional A/V 
studio working with multiple cameras, additional lighting, the 
works (though they did have some audio problems in the 
beginning). Andrei confirmed that the recordings will be 
published.

The audience was packed - 400 people in total. Quite amazing. I 
did not recognize anyone, which on the other hand is great 
because the event reached 399 people new to D :) Also the % of 
women was much higher than the past DConfs I've attended. There 
were a few people in the audience familiar with 
recent/untraditional programming languages (Rust, Nim, Haskell) 
so there was some nice dialogue at times (Andrei had to impose a 
budget on the first 5 rows to get the rest of the audience to 
participate).

The event was organized very well considering the audience size 
and free attendance. There were free t-shirts, beverages, snacks, 
and even beer at the end - very nice of Siemens.

The talks:

The schedule was rearranged a bit, so it doesn't quite correspond 
to the one on the website (or I might be just misremembering). 
IIRC, the order was: welcome address, "Three cool things about D" 
by Andrei, "Interfacing D to legacy C++ code" by Walter, "Writing 
quick code, quickly" by Andrei, followed by the panel.

Andrei's first talk was mainly concerning with "pure", its 
variants (strong/weak), rules and benefits, as well as a quick 
description of CTFE and the famous ctRegex benchmark where D 
beats everything else. I'm not sure if some slides were skipped 
over due to time constraints.

Walter's talk was about how D was extended to gradually support 
more ways to interface with C++ (class/vtable layouts, 
namespaces, extern(C++), name mangling etc.) and how it helped 
DDMD.

Andrei's second talk, "Writing quick code, quickly" was not 
related to D, but I enjoyed it immensely. It covers some 
interesting optimization problems with some surprising solutions. 
I highly recommend watching this.

Finally, there was the panel with Scott Meyers. This included a 
book giveaway for the most embarrassing questions, of which there 
were many. A big part of the audience had left at this point 
though, as it was getting late. Many questions concerned D's 
ecosystem, e.g. whether we have good debugging GUIs for all 
platforms, which we don't for OS X. The books were TDPL (the rare 
edition with no author on the cover), Ali's D book, and a C++ 
book by either Andrei or Scott (unfortunately I do not remember), 
all signed by their authors.

This was all for the conference. We took the rest of the weekend 
to tour Brașov and do some sightseeing. The most striking thing 
about the city is the number of roundabouts - probably 90% of 
intersections were replaced by them! If you're around, do make 
sure to make the climb to the mountain looming above the old city 
(or just take the cable car), the view is awesome.