Blog series to teach and show off D's metaprogramming by creating a JSON serialiser

SealabJaster sealabjaster at gmail.com
Thu Oct 31 00:05:06 UTC 2019


https://bradley.chatha.dev/Home/Blog?post=JsonSerialiser1

Currently only the first post is out, as I'd like to collect 
feedback before writing any more.

The series is aimed at people new to D, or people who have heard 
of D, but haven't really explored its metaprogramming too much, 
hence certain things such as calling D's metaprogramming "often 
overlooked" as that tends to be true for non/new users of D.

Sorry in advance if this is the wrong forum group to post to, I 
didn't know whether to put it here or in the Learn group.

Future plans for this series:
  * Serialising structs (next up).

  * Serialising enums via their names, rather than values (and 
certain complications such as is(SomeEnum == int) being true).

  * Serialising classes.

  * Using UDAs to let classes and structs customise their fields.

  * Using __traits(compiles) to determine if a struct or class 
implements a custom (de)serialisation function.

  * Trying to think of how I can shoe horn mixin templates in, 
just so they're shown off.

I'm welcome to any other ideas to try and fit into the series. 
The serialiser won't be overly robust in terms of edge cases 
(such as nested classes/structs needing to be filtered out 
sometimes), but I'll try to mention them and provide a workaround 
where possible.

I've also taken to certain decisions in the code snippets, to try 
and reduce the amount of things I need to explain at once, and to 
hopefully make things more readable. e.g. Using "const string" 
instead of just "const" or "enum" (and then having to explain why 
not to use "enum" for strings), giving all if and else statements 
brackets to make things more readable (that's the plan at least), 
etc.

As for release schedule, I'm planning on getting at least one 
post out a week.

Other than feedback for the actual content of the blog, I'd also 
appreciate any feedback on visual style of the blog, since I'm 
quite a novice at CSS, let alone writing things like this.

While I'm not really capable of contributing to D in terms of 
improving phobos, or writing quality libraries, I'm hoping to at 
least be able to provide some educational material on what I feel 
makes D worth it as a way of contribution.


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