Marketing of D - article topic ideas?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> Anyone have good ideas on topics for D articles?

Here are 7 possible articles:

1) We can write some cool larghish library/program and then show the results of the program, something like a small 2D or 3D game, a numerical plotting lib, etc. Graphics is very good because it catches the eye even if it's something simple.
For example I'd like to translate a small CPS (Constraint Problem Solver) like this into a single D2 module:
http://labix.org/python-constraint
Once written such module can be the basis for a "cool" article about one D2 usage (and then I can use the CPS module in various ways).
I have other ideas for useful/nice single modules for D2, there are plenty of ideas to copy from in repositories of modules/programs written in Python, Perl, Ruby, Clojure, etc.


2) Another possibility is to appeal to the C++ crowd, for example translating this C++ to D2:
http://accu.org/index.php/journals/1422
A literal translation of the C++ code of this article to D2 is possible, but at the end of the D2 article it can show that there is a better solution in D2, like using variable-argument templated structs to implement n-way trees of types, as I have discussed a bit with Downs (keeping in mind that C++0x too has variable-argument templates. If you want to compare D2 with C++ to show D2 then you *must* use C++0x otherwise people will say you are cheating).


3) This is another awesome small C++ program that must be translated to D2 (but I am not certain this is the most updated version of this program), it's just a single C++ file about 24 KB of code and heavely templated, and in my opinion no other language beside C++ and D (and maybe Lisp) can be used to write a program so fast and so short to solve this:
http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/samples/games/article.php/c13607/
It's textual and console-based code, so almost no libs are required.
Once translated, this can be the basis for a good article that explains the D2 code, templates, etc.


4) Another quite interesting article can show how to implement Expression templates in D2, like the ones used in Blitz++ and successive libs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_templates
(If this article uncovers problems in D2 language then it's better to find them now than later :-) ).


5) You have noticed that I write a lot in this newsgroup. My recent "Huffman coding comparison" post can be seen as an article that shows D2 and Phobos2 because the D2 code I've shown there is nice looking.


6) You can find C++0x variadic templates articles that can be translated to D2:
http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2008_02/article2/
http://mlangc.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/using-c0x-variadic-templates-to-pretty-print-types/


7) This is one of the changes in G++ 4.5:
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html
>Compilation time for code that uses templates should now scale linearly with the number of instantiations rather than quadratically, as template instantiations are now looked up using hash tables.<
So an article about D2 can show how DMD template performance is compared to the template performance of G++ 4.5. See also:
http://cpptruths.blogspot.com/2010/03/faster-meta-programs-using-gcc-45-and.html

Bye,
bearophile