Back from the dead - How is D going?

[Lutger]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:

> Hi everyone!
> 
> After a long hiatus I think I'm now able to come back to the D community
> and  be participating with it again. As a result I have more than 16000
> unread posts in digitalmars.D alone and I'm still wondering whether I
> should try to check all those threads or not... (I will read up on the
> announce NG at least).
> Regardless of whether I do that or not, would anyone be so kind as to
> posting a brief (or longer if willing :P) info of the main issues that
> have come up in the last year or so? How is the Tango vs Phobos
> integration? 1.0 vs 2.0? Concurrency features? Tool stuff, like LDC and
> stuff, how are they going? Thanks in advance. :)
> 
> 
> The only thread I've read from that back is the recent one about the Go
> language... that's some pretty big news!
> 
> 
> BTW, I've moved to London, are there any other D enthusiasts around
> here? Or in UK in general? From the top of my head, since the last time
> I was around, I don't remember any major poster who was from the UK.
> 
> 

Hi, welcome back!

Here are a couple of bullet points for you, not sure what you missed and 
what not:

- Andrei Alexandrescu is writing (has almost completed) a book on D, to be 
published around before april 2010 iirc

- Around the same time, D2 should be finished. 

- About concurrency: everything is tread-local now, except when you 
explicitly type something as shared, which is a transitive type constructor. 
Threading is not fully worked out yet. There was a proposal by Bartosz 
Milewski for a more radical race-free type system but it has not been 
accepted for D2 at least. AST macros are also not going to not make it in D2

- While Sean Kelly maintains the runtime under the name of druntime, the 
rest of tango is still separate and not ported to D2. Tango also has not 
adopted druntime. There is a recent thread about license issues, so this 
problem persists still.

- LDC seems to be going strong, at least for 32 and 64 bit linux. No windows 
(except if you can live without exceptions) and no D2 yet.

- both phobos and dmd backend are under version control in dsource. Since 
the backend source code got available, lots and lots of bugs got fixed. 

- phobos is expanding, (see Alexandrescu's work on ranges)

- dsss is not maintained, team0xf has a new build tool called xfbuild

- There are quite comprehensive bindings / wrapper for Qt called QtD, 
supporting both D1 and D2