More technical material for the blog? Merge the newsletter?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

Mike Parker has done a fantastic job with the D blog: I really 
like the unique direction he's taken, focusing on D users and 
their first-hand experiences.  It is what I tried to do with my 
interviews that ran in the newsletter, and he's taken it to 
another level.  Compare other recent compiled languages' blogs 
and nobody else is doing this (you could argue they don't need to 
because they have more traction, but I suspect they underrate its 
importance):

https://blog.rust-lang.org
https://swift.org/blog/
https://blog.golang.org

Looking at their blogs, they mostly consist of release 
announcements along with a few longer technical articles, some 
examples of the latter:

https://swift.org/blog/whole-module-optimizations/
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html
https://blog.golang.org/constants

We're missing these tech posts on the D blog, these are the few I 
found:

https://dlang.org/blog/2016/06/16/find-was-too-damn-slow-so-we-fixed-it/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/09/28/how-to-write-trusted-code-in-d/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/11/07/big-performance-improvement-for-std-regex/

They're all good examples of what we need more of, though the 
regex one could stand to be longer (or at least the first of a 
series of posts).  That long technical article about 
std.algorithm.find was the third most-liked post from the blog in 
the last year on reddit, which surprised me:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/dlang.org/top/?sort=top&t=year

D is really trying to do things differently in many ways, we need 
writers to lay out how.  Andrei or someone else familiar with it 
should write an article about std.algorithm and how it works and 
why it's better.  Walter, Kenji, or Daniel should write an 
article on why the dmd frontend is so fast, ie all the technical 
decisions that make it so.

Dmitry should write a version of his std.regex talk at DConf 
2014, laying out why std.regex is so fast while being so compact, 
updated for today (he had some great answers along this vein when 
I interviewed him last summer, would love to read the longer 
version - http://arsdnet.net/this-week-in-d/jun-28.html).  Robert 
Schadek should write about std.logger and what it took to finally 
ship it.  Jonathan Davis should write about the massive 
std.datetime and some of the key technical decisions that went 
into it.  These posts could even be repurposed for the docs, 
either copy-pasted or linked from there.

I know why this doesn't happen: these articles take more time and 
effort than a couple hours answering questions over email.  But 
for major selling points of D, it needs to be done.  Ideally, the 
article would be written by the technical author, as they know 
the code best, but it doesn't have to be.

As for announcements, it's time to move the newsletter to the 
blog, there's no reason to keep them separate.