D Language Foundation December 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary

[Mike Parker]

The D Language Foundation's monthly meeting for December 2023 
took place on Friday the 8th at 16:00 UTC. It lasted two hours.

## The Attendees

The following people attended the meeting:

* Andrei Alexandrescu
* Paul Backus
* Walter Bright
* Iain Buclaw
* Martin Kinkelin
* Razvan Nitu
* Mike Parker
* Adam D. Ruppe
* Steven Schveighoffer
* Timon Gehr
* Adam Wilson

## The Summary

### Me
I opened the meeting by detailing my plans for how we run our 
monthlies going forward. The approach we'd been using from the 
beginning was to give each person a turn, allowing them to bring 
up multiple topics before moving on to the next person. Sometimes 
someone had nothing to report, sometimes one or two issues, 
sometimes a progress report on their work, and sometimes one or 
more issues that got us into long discussions. Given that our 
invite list had grown quite a bit in the preceding months, this 
had become cumbersome, leading to overly long meetings or 
discussions being abruptly tabled in the interest of moving on.

So, I informed everyone that starting with our January monthly 
meeting, I would send out the invitations earlier than usual and 
ask everyone to email me a prioritized list of agenda items. Then 
at the meeting, I would only call on the people who sent me a 
list, going round robin in the order I received them, starting 
with the first item from each list, then the second, and so on, 
until either there were no more items or we hit the 
hour-and-a-half mark. If we did hit the time limit, we could 
decide whether to go on to two hours or not.

I introduced and welcomed Paul Backus. This was his first time 
with us. I'd had a call with him a couple of weeks before and 
invited him to join us. He'd said, "Sure, I can come in for a 
meeting." I told him I wasn't asking him to come to one meeting 
but to join us as a regular member. I thought his contributions 
would be valuable. Happily, he accepted.

__UPDATE__: We did start the new approach in January.

### Adam W.
Adam W. opened by telling us he'd received an email from someone 
using the crypto library he'd written a few years ago. The person 
reported some bugs and made the case that D needed crypto in the 
standard library. Without that, it was hard to know which library 
to trust. Adam W. said he was going to fix the bugs and, since he 
had now started working on Phobos v3 (which the person who 
emailed him had no way of knowing), wanted to talk later about 
getting crypto in.

Regarding Phobos v3, Adam W. said he and Walter had discussed it 
at the Seattle meetup in November. He'd sent Walter a document 
and Walter had suggested he put it up on GitHub for feedback and 
discussion. At the moment, he and Walter were having a debate 
over how to version the standard library, and he expected that 
would continue at the next Seattle meetup the following week.

__UPDATE__: You can view [the Phobos v3 Design 
document](https://github.com/LightBender/PhobosV3-Design) in Adam 
W.'s repo, and participate [in the ongoing 
discussion](https://github.com/LightBender/PhobosV3-Design/discussions). The repo was initially private, but he made it public during this meeting.

### Timon
Timon said he had some type system and language issues but didn't 
think they were at the forefront right now. He suggested we could 
discuss them in a different meeting. I asked if he wanted to get 
in on our planning sessions. He said he did.

### Adam R.
Adam R. said that the PR for the `@standalone` attribute opened 
in August and the string interpolation thing that had been open 
for a while were both stalled out. He then said he was very 
interested in the Phobos v3 stuff and would love to see the 
document. Adam W. said made the repo public and posted the link 
in the chat.

I said I'd thought Walter had approved `@standalone` in a 
previous meeting, then asked if Razvan or Dennis had looked at 
the PR. Dennis said there had been a weird test failure on it, 
but it was passing now. He thought the bug might still be there, 
but just wasn't triggering. Even so, since it was green, it was 
going to be merged. Paul said he'd dug into it and found that the 
problem was a timeout on the CI test runner, so it shouldn't be a 
blocker.

Walter said there had been disagreement over whether the feature 
should be an attribute or a pragma, and that had been his main 
objection to it. He thought it just didn't look good as an 
attribute, especially given how it was an extremely specific use 
case. He thought pragma was more suitable for it.

Adam R. noted that pragmas weren't backward compatible. Walter 
said unrecognized pragmas were supposed to be ignored. That was 
their intended purpose. Dennis said that's not how the compiler 
currently worked. There was a switch to ignore pragmas. Walter 
hadn't been aware that had been added. He told Adam he'd take a 
look at the PR again.

Timon commented that although pragmas are supposed to be benign, 
pragma mangle could break safety guarantees. Walter said he 
certainly hadn't thought about that. He asked Timon to post a 
Bugzilla issue, and [that's now Issue 
#24275](https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24275).

__UPDATE__: Walter approved the PR, and `@standalone` [was 
included in 
2.107.0](https://dlang.org/changelog/2.107.0.html#dmd.standalone-attribute). With the same release, [unrecognized pragmas are no longer an error](https://dlang.org/changelog/2.107.0.html#dmd.pragma) and are instead ignored.

I next reminded everyone that Átila had volunteered to write the 
spec for the string interpolation implementation. He'd gone on 
vacation for a couple of weeks, and when he came back he'd told 
Adam he was too busy catching up with Symmetry stuff and would 
get back to it later. Adam said a problem with D in general was 
that everything moved at such a slow, slow pace. I told him I 
dreamed that we'd be in a position to make things go faster at 
some point.

### Paul

__Questions__

Paul said he didn't have any specific issues to bring up, just a 
couple of questions. First, he asked about the status of DIP 1000 
and scope, and what the plans were for moving forward. Who was 
responsible for it and where were they writing things down about 
it?

Walter said he and Dennis had been the ones working on it, and 
they'd only been writing things down in terms of bug reports and 
pull request comments. I said that my understanding was that we'd 
decided to defer the full implementation to an edition, and I 
wasn't sure if the documentation was up to date. Dennis said the 
spec should be mostly up to date, though it may not be complete 
on every detail. The main issue was that we'd halted making it 
default because of breakage, so we'd decided to wait until 
editions were fleshed out. There had been some alternative 
proposals at DConf, so he was unsure how to continue when we were 
not going for DIP 1000 by default yet. We could continue fixing 
bugs in the meantime, though.

Paul said he was just wondering where to go to know that these 
kinds of decisions had been made, and how things were 
progressing. Was it just here in these meetings and the 
summaries, or was there another written record? I told him there 
were no other records.

Paul's next question was whether anyone was working on extending 
attribute inference to all functions, and no one knew of any such 
effort. Walter said a big issue with that was that it would 
dramatically slow down the compiler. After a bit of discussion, 
Paul clarified that the reason he was asking these questions was 
because he was concerned there might be work or planning going on 
that interested parties would miss, and that could lead to 
duplicated effort.

Walter said we didn't know what people were doing outside of what 
we talked about in our meetings. People tended to self-select. 
The way to find out was to post in the newsgroups and ask if 
anyone was working on anything. I reminded everyone that we [had 
a project tracker](https://github.com/orgs/dlang/projects) that 
we all should be using so that anyone could see what we were 
working on as we were doing it. I was the only one using it 
regularly. It would be great if all of us could incorporate it 
into our workflows.

__Speaking of attribute inference...__

Adam R. asked Walter if he'd approve global attribute inference 
if someone showed him an implementation that didn't significantly 
increase compile times. Or did he have other concerns? Walter 
said that was the main concern because it required the compiler 
to do semantic analysis of the function's body. You could also 
run into chicken and egg problems when you needed to know the 
attributes, so you needed to compile some other function, then 
that function required something else to be compiled first, and 
that could cause all these circular reference issues. But compile 
speed was the primary issue. For performance reasons, the D 
compiler tried to compile only what it had to.

Walter's main fear was that it would change the order of semantic 
analysis, which was a very fragile part of DMD. He was afraid 
that existing code would break in really weird ways. He suggested 
we could do it gradually, like turn it on for constructors or 
member functions, and see how that goes before enabling it 
generally.

Razvan said he expected we'd have more occurrences of an issue 
that currently happened with attribute inference on templates. If 
you had two templates cyclically calling each other, then the 
compiler just inferred them as being `@system`. It was more 
conservative in this aspect, not smart. Because templates were 
often used like normal functions, that problem didn't appear very 
often. But if you turned on attribute inference for all 
functions, it was going to hit more frequently. We'd need to fix 
this issue first.

Timon thought that recursion in template functions was actually 
quite common. He said in general, the issue with attribute 
inference was that it wasn't decideable with all the 
introspection capabilities D had. What should probably be done 
was not to compute the smallest fixed point, which was done now, 
but to compute the largest fixed point.

Walter agreed, saying that now if the compiler failed to infer 
attributes it took the most conservative approach and decided 
there were no attributes. We could flip it around and make it 
more aggressive when it hit the circular conundrum. He wasn't 
sure how it would work out. Timon said it should only do that if 
there was no reason not to do it. If something caused a safety 
error, then the compiler shouldn't infer safe, but otherwise it 
should. Right now, it just didn't.

Walter said the problem was that if you did that, you'd have to 
go back and all the functions that you'd already marked as being 
safe would have to be unmarked. He wasn't saying it wasn't 
implementable, but it just wouldn't work the same way. Timon said 
it was probably tricky. This was why it hadn't been done yet, but 
we could work on it. Razvan agreed, but he just wanted to point 
out that he thought this was going to bite us.

Adam said he just wanted a commitment that if we could solve the 
problems, the speed problem, etc., that it would get in. In that 
case, it would be worth trying, but wouldn't be otherwise. Walter 
said if the problems could be solved, then it was worth merging.

Walter noted his own experience with this. He kept trying to add 
`const` and other attributes to the DMD source code and found 
that D was completely recursive. Everything eventually wound up 
depending on everything else, making it hard to use `const` 
anywhere in it. It was frustrating, and he expected other 
attributes would have the same problem.

### Steve
Steve said he'd done his new class teaching D to homeschool 
students, and it had gone very well. He was in the process of 
building a website that he could reuse for it later. He was 
scheduled to teach a follow-on class in January.

### Iain
Iain said he'd pushed out 2.106.0 at the beginning of the month.

On the infrastructure side, he said that tour and 
run.dlang.io/.org had gone offline for about half a month. So 
he'd set up a copy inside a container on one of the build CI 
machines that he owned. It was a permanent place for it until we 
were ready to move it to a DLF server. He asked if there was 
anyone looking into making that happen. I told him I'd had an 
update from Petar Kirov. He wanted to get the Tour set up so that 
it was just a one-click, automatic deployment. That's what we 
were waiting on, but I had no idea when he would get it done. He 
did have access to our VPS account, though, so whenever it was 
ready he could get it set up without blocking on anyone else. 
Then any of us who had access to the account could spin it up 
when needed. Ideally, I thought that should generally be Iain, 
Mathias, Robert, and whoever else was suited for it.

Next, Iain said GDC was still tracking mainline. He was in the 
process of bootstrapping and regression testing the merge commit 
for 2.106. Once he got the results back from that, he'd push it. 
He'd gotten sidetracked on that a bit because the refactoring 
Razvan had been doing had triggered an old template regression. 
It didn't affect the newer releases, but some targets depended on 
an older version of GDC to bootstrap the latest compiler. He'd 
worked out that it was just the first version of GDC that got 
merged into GCC that was affected, but he wasn't quite ready to 
bump the baseline. So long as we kept GDC 9 working with the DMD 
mainline, he was happy.

### Martin

__Sucess stories__

Martin said he would start with some little success stories. 
First, 2.106 was looking pretty good. He'd tested it on the 
Symmetry code base and had encountered no unit test regressions 
so far. Nor had he noticed any performance regressions. He hadn't 
checked very deeply, but it was looking good. Ditto for LDC 1.36: 
no unit test regressions anywhere.

He said he'd undertaken his first ImportC experiments over the 
past few weeks and it was looking good. He'd done it on 
production code, using three libraries, including Postgres. The 
preprocessed C file on Windows was over 200,000 lines, over 
400,000 when using the Microsoft preprocessor, and ImportC was 
able to swallow all of it. The general bindings seemed to be 
sufficient.

He said the C libraries they used didn't make use of a lot of 
macros, so that was one reason why it worked so well. He'd also 
tried it on python.h, which was a monster of macros, and nothing 
worked there. They still needed to use DPP for that. But 
comparing ImportC and DPP, ImportC was easier once he figured out 
that he shouldn't compile the C file, just import it. That got 
him around the issues regarding inline assembly and missing GCC 
macros he'd brought up at the last meeting.

So, Martin could confirm that ImportC was usable, at least for 
some scenarios. He thought that was pretty great. It worked on 
Windows and Linux. He hadn't tested it on Mac but thought it was 
cool that it worked on Windows. It was also faster than DPP. For 
example, one DPP invocation that took 10 minutes on Windows was 
done in something like a second with ImportC. Very cool.

Walter thanked Martin for the highlight of this meeting. He said 
he loved hearing about when things worked.

Martin said one thing that did come up was missing attributes. 
He'd seen a Bugzilla issue about it. The C functions defined in C 
headers got no attributes at all. No `nothrow`, no `@nogc`, etc. 
The only concern in that issue was a theoretical problem that the 
C function might take a callback, a function pointer, which might 
be a D function, which might be using the GC or throwing 
exceptions. He thought that was such a rare case, we just 
shouldn't worry about it. If you wanted to do that, you could 
just declare that specific C function in D yourself with the 
attributes that you needed, because you couldn't insert those 
attributes in the C file.

__Regression in 2.103__

Martin said there was a regression about missing struct 
`TypeInfo` symbols in 2.103. He gave his analysis of the problem, 
saying it was related to making decisions about codegen based on 
the scope of a template instance, and how the compiler decided 
not to do codegen in speculative contexts. He thought he had a 
temporary fix for it, but he needed to dustmite the problematic 
use case.

He said he'd been thinking of automating the dustmite process. He 
was tired of trimming down because it took so much time. 
Symmetry's compiler invocations had huge command lines, and 
getting all of the dependencies, all of the imports, and 
dustmiting was a huge PITA. But in this case, once he got it 
minimized, he'd submit a proper fix for it.

__Makefiles__

Next, Martin reported he'd just started getting rid of the DMD 
makefiles that had been deprecated for years. The DMD release 
process still needed them, but he had a PR for that.

As part of this, he'd taken the original posix.mak file and 
switched it to a generic makefile to also work on Windows. There 
were some constraints, of course. We needed GNU make instead of 
Digital Mars make on Windows, and all the GNU tools needed to be 
in the path. That comes with Git for Windows nowadays. To really 
clean up and make the top-level generic makefile really work, he 
proposed getting rid of the Digital Mars makefiles, the win32.mak 
and win64.mak files. We had the POSIX makefile which worked 
everywhere except Windows, and on Windows we had win32.mak which 
was just for the OMF stuff, and win64.mak which was for both 
32-bit and 64-bit MSCOFF builds. We could just merge that into 
one makefile as long as there were no objections to relying on 
the GNU tools on Windows. He asked if Walter was okay with that.

This took us into a long discussion about duplicated code in the 
makefiles, what GNU tools we'd need, whether it would be 
difficult to merge all three makefiles into one, runtime 
integration tests, and a mini-rant by Walter asking why we had 
makefiles in the first place. He said that compiling DMD should 
be simple, and these makefiles we had that used every feature of 
GNU make were not simple.

In the end, Walter said he could not argue that we should keep 
maintaining different makefiles for Digital Mars make and GNU 
make. Three different makefiles with build.d thrown in was an 
abomination anyway you looked at it. I suggested we discuss the 
details of this in our next planning session, and everyone agreed.

During this discussion, Dennis and Adam R. had brought up `dmd 
-i` in the text chat, and Dennis had given a command line that 
worked right now. Martin noted that was only for the compiler. We 
didn't have anything similar for DRutime or Phobos. Those were 
fully makefile.

Andrei said that we'd had this kind of discussion for a long 
time. He thought we should just let Matin run roughshod over 
whatever we have now and make it into something different. 
Because at this point, anything different was almost certain to 
be better. He said we were in that space now. Everyone in the 
room hated what was there now. So why not just make it different? 
Maybe at least a few of us would hate it less.

And as for depending on GNU make, we should just get over 
ourselves, bite the bullet, and just use that tool. He thought 
Walter had said very well his point that using different build 
systems for different OSes was an untenable position. He added 
that he'd been at a conference talk not long ago where he'd 
learned that apparently everybody and their blind dog was using 
CMake now. He knew we'd be groaning over our muted mics about his 
mentioning CMake, but maybe we should just look into getting with 
the program and using CMake.

__UPDATE__: The deprecated makefiles were removed in [the 2.107.0 
release](https://dlang.org/changelog/2.107.0.html#dmd.makefiles). 
Additionally, the top-level posix.mak was renamed to Makefile and 
now includes the functionality of both win32.mak and win64.mak, 
both of which were removed. The release also included makefile 
cleanup for DRuntime and Phobos.

### Dennis

__ImportC__

Dennis said he'd not had much success with ImportC yet. He'd been 
sending Walter bug reports about struct initializers. Walter 
apologized and said that was his (Walter's) fault. He found the C 
initializer syntax to be the most incomprehensible, awful thing, 
which was why D didn't use that syntax at all. He said he was 
continually tripped up by that. He sometimes despaired of ever 
making a working implementation that does the C initializer 
syntax. He'd seen Dennis's regressions and was going to try to 
fix them.

Dennis thanked him and said he did see the light at the end of 
the tunnel. His project was closer and closer to being compiled 
with ImportC. Walter thanked him for being diligent about filing 
the bugs in Bugzilla.

__Restructuring DRuntime__

Dennis said there was a proposal, in the form of some PRs, to 
restructure DRuntime. He'd emailed Walter and Iain, and he 
thought Iain had already seen it. Walter said he hadn't seen it 
yet, but he would look at it.

Dennis just wanted to know, without looking at the details, if 
Walter was open to the idea of restructuring DRuntime with 
separate folders for each OS, or if his initial instinct was that 
it was a bad idea. Walter said that had proposed the same back 
before Razvan and Dennis joined us, there had been a huge fight 
about it, and his proposal had been shot down. He'd thought 
things would be easier if each OS had its own tree of 
implementations, but other people didn't like it. He was a little 
surprised to see it had resurfaced.

Dennis asked if Walter remembered who those people were. Walter 
said the thought Iain had been one of them. Iain said that, from 
memory, Walter had picked a very trivial module to convert, and 
as the cherry on top, that looked fine. But then Iain had picked 
a substantially more complex module and it had all fallen apart 
relatively easily. He said he hadn't liked the idea of taking 
something that's encapsulated into a thousand-line module, and 
then splitting that into five potential thousand-line modules.

Razvan said he'd taken a look at those PRs and it seemed that 
they followed that pattern. He didn't understand the benefit and 
said it seemed like a matter of taste. Walter said the benefit, 
in his experience, was that whenever you tried to support 
multiple operating systems with one file, you'd wind up with an 
incomprehensible tangle, and then when you added something, not 
all the OSes would be checked to see if they still worked with 
that file. Then you'd end up having incorrect declarations for a 
particular OS. This was especially bad when you had bit flags, 
and the bit flags hand magic numbers varied from compiler to 
compiler. Ending up with the wrong magic number for an OS could 
lead to really, really strange problems. By separating them, when 
you updated the Windows file, you wouldn't accidentally break the 
Mac implementation.

There was also a reading comprehension problem with reading a 
file that was full of conditional compilation. It becomes 
difficult to see which OS a piece of code is for. Splitting them 
up means more lines of code, sure, but the compiler isn't 
compiling more lines of code. It just picks the path through and 
compiles the one for the current OS. So he didn't think the old 
"don't repeat yourself" mantra was useful to apply here. When you 
split it out and you're figuring out how it works, you've only 
got one OS to deal with at a time and not a rat's nest of 
versioning to deal with.

Iain said that then you'd just move the rat's nest of versioning 
in with it. For Linux in particular, you couldn't just say 
`version(linux)` and you'd be fine. You had to ask if you're 
working with the GNU C runtime, the MUSL runtime, etc. Walter 
said he was right, but with Linux and the Unix thing, you had 
POSIX. That took care of a lot of that. You couldn't get rid of 
versions completely.

There was some more discussion along these lines. Finally, Walter 
said that with the proposed change, he'd need input from Iain and 
Martin on whether it was acceptable. Iain said that his first 
impression of it was that he didn't like having a generic 
fallback. Walter agreed. He said he'd leave it up to Iain on 
whether to accept the proposal. He didn't want to repeat the long 
argument they'd had over it last time. Iain said he would need to 
reread the old thread from back then to see if he still agreed 
with everything he'd written back then.

Iain then pondered if we did go forward with dicing things by OS, 
would we then dice by runtime? By architecture? Where would it 
stop? Walter thought if we restricted it to Windows, POSIX, OSX, 
Linux, and FreeBSD, we should be fine.

Martin said he didn't like this idea at all. He totally got 
Walter's first point about breaking one implementation when 
modifying another, but he hoped in the future we'd be able to 
have some little CI checks running on these systems. So then 
maybe we could use ImportC to check our declarations against the 
ImportC declarations. But he disagreed completely with Walter's 
second point about legibility. He detailed some examples of how 
and why he found that having everything in the same module 
improved legibility. He conceded that in some cases, splitting 
things up would be an improvement, but felt that most of the time 
it would be the opposite.

Walter said that Martin was really saying was that we shouldn't 
make a hard and fast rule. We should use our best judgment on 
when to split things up. But one thing he did really want is that 
whenever there were versions for operating systems in the code, 
there had to be an else clause that had a `static assert(0)` in 
it. That way, when a new OS was added, you'd instantly find all 
the cases in the runtime that you needed to check for OS-specific 
dependencies. He didn't like having a generic version in this 
case because it would always lead to someone forgetting to update 
an else clause in there, causing some kind of mismatch that would 
be hell to debug.

Andrei said that this whole little debate was about where to draw 
the line between "I don't want to duplicate code" and "I want to 
specialize code for each OS". An untested generic version was not 
great to have, so the `static assert(0)` thing was great to have. 
But that's not to say that someone would figure out once it fires 
that one implementation works for both this and that OS, and then 
would simply copy and paste one implementation in place of the 
static assert. He would say that everyone present was a good 
engineer and was able to look at the code and decide if it was 
good engineering or bad engineering.

### Andrei
Andrei said he'd been looking over the Phobos v3 document that 
Adam W. had linked, and he had a few comments. He understood that 
this was not a finished document and just a list of thoughts. He 
thought there were some great thoughts here. The point that the 
existing Phobos should continue to be supported was a great 
decision. And the discussions about it on GitHub involving other 
people were great.

However, though the document was aspirationally in the right 
place, he thought there was a need for a careful study of 
language and features and library organization as to how that's 
to be implemented without duplicating the entire body of Phobos. 
So one question would be, what steps could we take to avoid 
duplicating the 700,000 lines of Phobos that we already had in 
their entire 90%, 80%, or even 40% if we were to reuse parts of 
Phobos core? He thought the document should say that we wanted to 
support the existing Phobos, but we should also include in the 
document a versioning mechanism that structured multiple versions.

Then he said that from a bird's eye view, the document should not 
be about what should not be in Phobos v3, only what *should* be 
there. It was good to put in writing what shouldn't be there, but 
Phobos v3 shouldn't be defined by saying it was Phobos without X, 
Y, and Z. It should be more that Phobos 3 was Phobos with this 
great overarching awesomeness, X, Y, and Z. It should have some 
positive things as opposed to saying "it's not going to have that 
crap".

At a lower level, "no memory allocation" was a nice aspirational 
thought, but it was completely unfeasible. It completely locked 
out things like "we want to have a hash table in Phobos". You 
couldn't have a hash table in Phobos if you didn't allocate 
memory. He thought it would be good to instead say we wanted to 
build hash tables and we wanted to build containers and see how 
far we could go by deferring memory allocation.

Regarding exceptions, Andrei thought that designing without 
exceptions was a difficult endeavor. There should be more 
discussion about whether or not we want to use exceptions or 
optional, or that kind of stuff. C++ had this new thing, 
std::expected, which was either a value or it wasn't, and you 
could make decisions based on that. That was a possibility.

Paul noted he'd been doing some exploratory work to see what it 
would take to implement a safe allocator interface and containers 
that use it by using DIP 1000 and system variables. He said 
anyone interested in that should get in touch with him. Andrei 
said that was great, but that seemed like a separate body of work 
than what was in the document. The document said Phobos would do 
no memory allocations, but if it's calling into allocators and 
saying that, then that's just dishonest.

Walter said that the stuff in the document about not allocating 
was just aspirational. He thought several functions in Phobos 
allocated when they didn't have to, and they threw exceptions 
when they didn't have to. He'd been able to rewrite `std.path` so 
that it didn't do any memory allocation. No one else had done 
that or thought about it. He hadn't thought it was possible until 
it suddenly came to him how to do it. But he also realized that 
it wasn't going to work everywhere. The idea was, could we figure 
out a way to do error returns that don't require exceptions, or 
solving these other problems without redefining the problem? When 
we could make it work, there were various ways of approaching it 
and maybe one would fit.

Walter agreed with Andrei that you couldn't have hashtables 
without allocations. He noted that when Andrei wrote 
`std.algorithm`, only one function in it allocated. Andrei said 
it was the Levenshtein Distance implementation, and that 
shouldn't even need memory. Anyway, Andrei just wanted to say 
that the document should be modified to say "no unnecessary 
memory allocations" rather than "no allocations".

Andrei noted that in the text chat, there was mention that 
returning error values had problems that motivated exceptions in 
the first place. He agreed. He said that in C++ there seemed to 
be a federation of ways to address error handling and people 
preferred one single way. So we should standardize on just 
exceptions, or just expected, or just error codes. That would 
seem to be better than "let's do a variety of these".

### Razvan
Razvan started by saying he had two students working on using 
dmd-as-a-library to replace other external dependencies.

__dfmt__

One of Razvan's students was a SAOC student who was making 
consistent progress on replacing libdparse with dmd-as-a-library 
in dfmt. He was at the point where it seemed he was going to be 
able to finish the project. So by the end of SAOC, he would have 
replaced libdparse entirely. So the problem that had arisen was, 
how could we integrate this work?

Razvan had initially thought it could just be integrated upstream 
into dfmt, but the dfmt maintainer, Jan Jurzitza (Webfreak), had 
pointed out that dfmt didn't necessarily need to parse the code. 
It was just using a lexer and only parsed a little bit in some 
cases when it needed to extract some information. In that case, 
if there was a breaking change in DMD, dfmt was still able to 
format your code. But with dmd-as-a-library, because the lexer 
was kind of a monolith, it wasn't breaking down into a lot of 
functions that you could overwrite. So what they were doing was 
creating an AST and then traversing it to output the formatted 
code. It was more work, but on the flip side, you were able to do 
more complicated passes and more complicated formatting than dfmt 
was currently able to do. But if there was a breaking change in 
DMD, then dfmt might crash with a compilation error in old code.

So Jan had suggested they start a separate project, dmd-fmt, and 
then use that. Razvan didn't like that approach, because if dfmt 
still had a small frontend that could be modified, then you'd 
always have to backport things. It was doable and wasn't 
complicated, but he felt it missed the point. People would just 
use dfmt and he didn't know if anyone would even use dmd-fmt. He 
felt the best approach was to integrate dmd-as-a-library upstream 
into dfmt and then specify a version with the build system. Or 
maybe editions could help solve it.

Martin said he'd thought along similar lines and thought we 
should bundle dfmt with the compiler. That way, the version of 
dfmt that ships with a compiler is compatible with and on the 
path with that compiler. Razvan said he thought the same and 
asked if anyone had any other opinions or if we should move 
forward with shipping dfmt with the compiler. No one had any 
objections.

__dscanner__

Razvan's second student was doing his Bachelor's degree on 
finishing the work of getting dmd-as-a-library into dscanner. The 
project was around 70% complete, and Razvan expected they'd get 
it finished by the end of the university year.

The problem here was the dscanner had a larger frontend than 
dfmt, and by "frontend" he meant code that is common for both the 
dmd-as-a-library and libdparse implementations. So two or three 
months before, Jan, who also maintained dscanner, had done some 
upstream refactoring where he modified the constructor of a base 
class which is inherited by everyone. So then trying to rebase 
with the upstream had resulted in hundreds of conflicts that took 
a couple of days to resolve. They were trivial fixes, but they 
had to be done by hand, one by one.

The question was, should they continue on the path they'd been 
on, making all the changes with the ultimate goal of pushing the 
final result upstream, or should they go ahead and get what's 
done upstream now, and keep pushing changes up incrementally? He 
felt the latter was the best approach, as then they'd no longer 
suffer from breaking changes and if the student disappeared, the 
work that was done would still be there. It would mean in 
upstream dfmt, some of the work would be done by 
dmd-as-a-library, and some by libdparse, but the ultimate goal 
was to replace libdparse, so he didn't see that as a problem.

No one had any opinions on this, so Razvan said he'd discuss it 
further with Jan.

__AST refactoring__

For his final issue, Razvan said he'd been working on pulling all 
of the semantic routines out of the AST nodes, and that had been 
annoying Iain very much. He'd made consistent progress. One issue 
that he didn't know how to solve was that some AST nodes had to 
store their backend symbols. He imagined this was probably 
annoying for GDC and LDC because he didn't think they were using 
those fields for anything. He wanted to pull them out somehow, 
but he didn't know of an efficient way to do it. He said the 
standard way would be to use a hash table, but he worried that 
would have an impact on performance.

Walter said this had come up before, and he knew that Iain 
objected to having DMD backend symbols in the AST nodes. Walter 
thought GDC and LDC could just ignore them. Martin said that's 
what LDC does. He didn't care about those symbols and provided 
some details about what the implementation does. He had no 
objections and said from his side, Razvan was free to do what he 
needed to with this.

Razvan said the main reason he was doing this was to break the 
dependency between the AST nodes and the backend. Otherwise, this 
refactoring of the semantic routines would be impossible. Since 
this stored data was typically a pointer, one solution would be 
to just use a void pointer there and whenever it is used in the 
front end, cast it to the appropriate type, and then the back end 
can take it.

Walter said that sounded like a workable solution. Razvan said 
that Iain had objected to it a month before by saying he didn't 
think it was as small a change for the C++ code bases, so Razvan 
should hold fire.

Iain said he still hadn't had the time to look into it. Martin 
said that from his perspective, there were no issues. He actually 
utilized `void*` in D files for certain internal C++ structures 
in LDC for which he lacked the definitions on the D side.

Iain said that on his side, this DMD backend symbol is actually 
an alias to a GCC anonymous union. They do use this symbol as a 
cache pointer. He said he should probably be using a hash table 
instead. And GCC's hash table was probably more efficient than 
DRuntime's. He didn't have the time to determine how much of a 
pain it would be to insert casts everywhere on the C++ side.

Razvan linked [proof-of-concept 
PR](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15786). He said that if we 
could agree this was a workable path forward, then he would need 
to do this for other symbols as well. It was a small change for 
this particular symbol for DMD, but for other symbols, he would 
have to insert probably thousands of casts.

There was more discussion about GDC and LDC internals, and 
finally, it was agreed to just make it `void*`.

### Walter
Walter said someone had published a forum post about how they'd 
used D to glue C++ and Rust together. Walter [had posted that to 
Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38564260), and 
no one had come over to help out.

One of the complaints Walter often heard about D was that nobody 
was using it. So what would help was when he or anyone shared 
things like this somewhere was for people from the D community to 
come by, leave a comment, do some upvoting, do some downloading, 
and just stamp their feet and let people outside of the forums 
know they existed. He thought it would greatly help D.

He'd hoped to get enough upvotes on that to make it on the front 
page of HN but had failed miserably. But that's what other 
language communities did. Rust had a constant stream of people 
going around looking for any place they could interject some 
comment about Rust. And the Zig people and the Nim people had 
done it. The D people just didn't do it. It wasn't a good thing 
for us to be modest and reticent talking about D.

Walter would just ask people to drop into places like that to be 
heard and be seen. That kind of thing was important to build 
social proof for D that there *is* a community, we *are* active, 
and all of that. He encouraged everyone to create a Hacker News 
account and just drop by once in a while to see if there's 
anything worthwhile to respond to.

## The next meeting

Our next meeting was a quarterly meeting with industry reps on 
January 5, 2024. Our next monthly meeting was held the following 
Friday, January 12.

If you have anything you'd like to bring up for discussion at one 
of our monthly meetings, please reach out to me 
(social at dlang.org), and I'll discuss with you how best to go 
about it.