MiniD 1.0 is getting very close...

[Kristian Kilpi]

Great news! :)

There is happening so much with D right now that I can't keep up...


On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:08:37 +0300, Jarrett Billingsley  
<kb3ctd2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So I haven't made an announcement about MiniD on the newsgroups in a long
> time.  MiniD recently had its first birthday (since the initial  
> inception of
> the idea.. it's since changed quite a bit from that), and appropriately
> version 1.0 is going to be out soon as a belated birthday present.
>
> The feature set has been frozen, so what features it has now are the 1.0
> spec.  The standard library is mostly solidified -- the transition to  
> Tango
> necessitated some changes in the IO model, but that's mostly been ironed
> out.  About the only thing that's still in flux is the native API.
>
> The last big thing before the true 1.0 release is a Pyd-like binding  
> library
> which makes it very easy to expose native D code to MiniD apps (and  
> probably
> also functionality to make it easier to deal with MiniD code from the  
> native
> app).  A simple example of the binding looks a bit like this:
>
> WrapModule!
> (
>     "foo",
>     WrapFunc!(one),
>     WrapFunc!(two),
>     WrapFunc!(three)
> );
>
> This will create and register a MiniD module with three functions inside  
> it.
> This module can then be imported and used from MiniD code with no issue.
> The binding layer transparently translates between the native D types and
> the MiniD types; no special considerations (other than the use of
> convertible types for parameters and return values) have to be taken when
> writing the native code.
>
> Of course this is easy but not necessarily the most performant.  It's  
> great
> for quickly exposing functionality that wasn't designed for MiniD to your
> scripts, but if you want the best performance, you can still write native
> functions that are made to work with the language runtime.  The API is
> really starting to come into its own, and virtually anything you can do  
> in
> MiniD code, you can do in native code.
>
> Now that MiniD is Tango-based, I had another idea: use the Fiber class to
> allow native coroutines.  Until now, coroutines had to be script  
> functions,
> as there's no way normally to suspend the execution of a native function.
> I've been playing around with Fiber, and I think it'll make native
> coroutines very doable.
>
> In any case, once the binding library is done, and with a bit of  
> testing, I
> think I'll be able to call this 1.0!
>
> Oh, I suppose you all would like some links ;)  The main page is at
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/minid.  The forums are
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=94, where many  
> announcements
> are posted (and if you want to start some discussion, go right ahead).
> Lastly I recently opened an IRC channel on freenode; it's called  
> #d.minid.
>
> MiniD compiles with DMD 1.0 on Windows and Linux, and depends on the  
> latest
> snapshot of Tango (not the latest stable release, the very
> bleeding-edging-est latest).  GDC is too old to compile it, so sorry Mac
> users.
>
>