D Language Quarterly Meeting Summary for January 2021

[Mike Parker]

I had a severe case of user error going into our January meeting. 
I had previously disabled audio input in OBS Studio for a project 
I was working on. I then forgot to enable it when I recorded the 
meeting. The text chat in Jitsi Meet, which I always make a point 
to keep open when recording, provides some clues to what was 
discussed, so do my sporadic remarks (mic input was enabled). 
Mathias and Max helped fill in some gaps.

I don't believe I've missed anything big. It was a routine 
meeting with no major decisions handled. But if any of the other 
participants have more to add, they can reply in the thread.

## The Meeting
The meeting took place on January 7, 2021, at 15:00 UTC and 
lasted a little over 1.5 hours. This was a quarterly meeting, so 
representatives from industry were present. The following people 
attended:

**D Language Foundation**

Andrei Alexandrescu
Walter Bright
Ali Çehreli
Max Haughton
Átila Neves
Razvan Nitu
Mike Parker

**Industry Reps & Contributors**

Iain Buclaw for GDC
Mario Kröplin for Funkwerk
Mathias Lang for ZeroOne (formerly known as BPFKorea)
Adam D. Ruppe as a Contributor
Robert Schadek for Symmetry Investments
Joseph Rushton Wakeling for Frequenz

### Mario
Mario had no issues to report.

### Joe
Joe had no issues to report.

### Robert
Robert brought up a specific issue with `Nullable`:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22619

This led to a discussion of other `Nullable` issues. Mario said 
that Funkwerk once had their own `Optional` but moved back to 
`Nullable` a few years ago. Robert volunteered to take on 
oversight of getting `Nullable` to work like it should. He agreed 
to write up a document outlining the issues preventing it from 
working as it should. I'll follow up with him on that later.

As for the issue, Martin Kinkelin submitted a fix for it a few 
days after the meeting and Razvan merged it:

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/8358

### Mathias
Mathias would very much like to see the unification of delegates 
and function pointers. There was general agreement that this is a 
good goal to aim for. Mathias subsequently informed me he will 
look into it once some other things are off his TODO list if no 
one else gets to it first.

He also noted that compiler releases are getting slower. We 
decided to add this topic to the agenda of a future meeting that 
includes Martin Nowak and Martin Kinkelin. Iain has subsequently 
spoken with Martin Nowak, who says that things will pick up again 
in the near future. Still, this is one of many points in our 
ecosystem that are 100% reliant upon one person, so it's 
something that should be discussed in our plans for multiple 
admins available for multiple services.

### Iain
Iain gave us a summary of the work he's been doing on GDC since 
the last quarterly meeting. He raised an issue with cross 
compiling from Arm to x86 that relates to D's 80-bit reals. Iain 
can correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the issue is that Arm 
doesn't support 80-bit reals, so the frontend needs an emulator 
to correctly handle compile-time operations (CTFE, const folding) 
when cross compiling for x86. This is something Walter will have 
to think about.

### Adam
Adam was unable to fully participate due to an issue with his 
microphone. He did leave comments in the text chat, and he noted 
that he was fine this time as an observer. We'll invite him to 
future meetings when his mic is working.

### Razvan & Max & Átila & Ali
These guys had no issues to raise, though Razvan did ask Walter 
to look at this issue:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13162

### Me
I brought up an `alias this` issue that had come up in a 
discussion on the community Discord server:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5380

I advocated for the approach in the closed PR that Razvan 
submitted a fix as a few years ago:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8815

In the discussion that ensued, the bigger problem with `alias 
this` is that fixing any issues with it will likely cause 
significant breakage. Andrei suggested that what we really need 
to do is go back to the drawing board with a DIP for a new 
feature that replaces and fixes the issues with `alias this`. We 
left it at that for now.

### Andrei
Andrei brought up std.v2, but this is where memory fails me. What 
I do recall is that there was a bit of talk about the std.v2 
namespace and how it will live alongside std, and this came up 
because Robert isn't convinced the planned approach is the right 
way to go about it. If Andrei or anyone else would like to say 
more about what was discussed, please post something below.

### Walter
Walter talked about the new `-vasm` switch, the disassembler he's 
added to DMD, and how he has already found it beneficial in his 
work. He noted the PR had not yet been merged, so Razvan took 
care of it.

## Next Month
The next meeting is a regular monthly meeting and should take 
place on February 4 at 15:00 UTC. I don't know yet what the 
agenda will be. We have a few items for which I'm awaiting news 
from others (the modified governance proposal, merging the 
DRuntime & DMD repositories, the initiative to bring all of the 
ecosystem services under the DLF with multiple admins, etc.). 
However, if you have an issue you'd like to the foundation to 
discuss and are willing to bring it to a monthly meeting, please 
let me know. We want to bring in to these meetings as many 
contributors as we can. Even with a major item on the agenda, 
there's room for one or two contributors to come in with their 
issues.