D Language Foundation October 2022 Quarterly Meeting Summary

[Iain Buclaw]

On Wednesday, 2 November 2022 at 04:42:06 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> ## Iain
> For the benefit of the industry folks who only join us in the 
> quarterlies, Iain recapped some of the things he'd covered in 
> the two previous monthly meetings, such as the move to 
> Backblaze for downloads.dlang.org and docharchives.dlang.io, 
> the transition to Cloudflare that gives us the benefit of free 
> data transfer with Backblaze, and the general tidying up of the 
> dlang.io namespace.
>
> He then said that Martin Nowak will not be doing any more 
> releases of the D language. Iain had been going through the 
> build scripts that we currently have and figuring out what 
> needs to be done to tailor them to run in GitHub Actions. It 
> was taking much longer than he had anticipated. In the interim, 
> he thought he could at least merge master into stable and get 
> some 2.101.0 alpha builds set up by hand. (He then [announced 
> the first beta on October 
> 17](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/etvlqbomriskyeihzpuv@forum.dlang.org).)
>

The release candidate is out now!

https://dlang.org/download.html

We plan to do v2.101.0 release on the 14th November.

> Next, he gave us a summary of his experience at the GNU 
> Cauldron where he attended a meetup of GCC/GDB maintainers. He 
> reported that there are some really interesting things going on 
> with GCC internals regarding the direction in which they're 
> taking the compiler, including several things we're doing 
> already. For example, they're adding options to automatically 
> initialize all static variables to 0 or a bitmask. This sort of 
> thing is good news for him, as he currently has to do all the 
> memsets by hand in GDC. It's a win if the middle-end can do 
> this for him. If you're interested in all the GCC internal 
> changes that Iain was gushing about and how he can benefit from 
> them in GDC, please ask him :-)
>

Correction, initialize all *local* variables. This new feature of 
GCC was added to increase the security and predictability of a 
program by preventing uninitialized memory disclosure and use.

This really shifts the dynamics between front-end (language 
implementation) and middle-end (compiler framework), because now, 
if GCC fails to zero out all bits in an object, it's no longer a 
GDC bug, rather a GCC security issue. :-)