[dmd-internals] 1st Biweekly Sprint Planning

Thu Jul 9 06:14:28 PDT 2015

Retrospective:

- Release

We're pretty late with the release, there has been little work on fixing
regressions.
I'm spending most of my time trying to finish the smart pointers/refs.

People are still surprised by the release, maybe we should publish dates
for the next few releases in advance?

Little participation in the release (except from Kenji and Vladimir),
nobody worked on bugfixes before the first beta, still no changelog for
new stuff, time is spent on the usual news discussions, and normal pull
requests.
We cannot succeed by dumping code into the master branch.
It's important that we develop with the next release in mind.

Last time we discussed separate changelogs per repo, so that PRs can
come with their corresponding changelog entry. Still sounds like a good
idea to me.

- Trello

Please make the boards public as well Andrei, people say they can't see it.

Too little activity yet, any help needed?
It's a pity to see it getting talked down before anyone but me actually
started using it http://forum.dlang.org/post/556A992B.7080105@erdani.com.
But Andrei still seems to remember past failure
http://forum.dlang.org/post/mctauq$kc9$1@digitalmars.com.

It's of utmost importance that we coordinate our work better to utilize
the little dev resources we have more efficiently.

- Forum

Thanks @Cybershadow.
Nice forum overhaul, fast search, keyboard shortcuts.
I'm missing the thread view.

=================================================================================

Finished Work:

My the last prerelease stories.

- core.aa proposal (https://trello.com/c/55mmbxq8/4-core-aa-proposal)

The discussion was not very fruitful.
http://forum.dlang.org/post/mjsma6$196h$1@digitalmars.com
Basically the only feedback came from IgorStepanov with whom I worked on
the last AA library attempt.

It seems that the issues of changing the existing AA are still
underestimated.
http://forum.dlang.org/post/ffnykfwzkqgxipyailvp@forum.dlang.org

Not sure how to drive this important topic forward against so much
indifference. Seems like "the harder the topic, the shorter the debate"
applies here as well
(http://producingoss.com/en/common-pitfalls.html#bikeshed).

- Fix merging of coverage reports
(https://trello.com/c/iUVmhC1I/5-fix-merging-of-coverage-reports)

Druntime can now merge coverage reports (and even avoids race conditions),
We found this non-working while enabling coverage tests for dub.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dub/pull/550
I still think merge by default would be a better choice.

Follow-up story coverage merge should detect changed source code.
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14790

- gdcproject - simplified download links for 4.9.2
https://trello.com/c/zpWDlmpU/10-gdcproject-simplified-download-links-for-4-9-2

We still manually update http://ftp.digitalmars.com/LATEST_GDC and Iain
manually creates symlinks to simplify the download links for Travis-CI.

https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/3920#issuecomment-103121272

Need a follow-up to automate gdc symlinks.

- Release 2.068.0-beta1
(https://trello.com/c/7FucaqS5/11-release-for-2-068-0-beta1)

Went OKish.
Adding support for HOST_DMD was simple
(https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/pull/124).
Some hacking required.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3433

Still need to compile all the mails I sent to Andrei into a nice wiki
page describing the whole process.
It would be great if more people than me could build a release.

- Follow-Up on postblit/destroyRecurse which are now provided by the
compiler
https://trello.com/c/rkIz1sDU/15-follow-up-on-postblit-destroyrecurse-which-are-now-provided-by-the-compiler-https-github-com-d-programming-language-druntime-pul

Asking people to follow-up on a PR is pretty unreliable and risks to
release incomplete/unfinished stuff.
Either we figure out how to better cooperate with contributors or we
must not merge code that requires more work.

It's tiresome that we keep producing incomplete features.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/4114#issuecomment-62203671

Maybe worth to do multiple/continuous reviews on a branch before making
a PR, instead of splitting branch work into multiple PRs.

- Update threshold for binary size check
(https://trello.com/c/O6c7XZrW/8-update-thresholds-for-binary-size-check)

Done by Walter, maybe follow-up with a more platform/optimization
specific approach.

=================================================================================

Next 2 weeks:

- Finish SmartRef Implementation.
(https://trello.com/c/pTlDuyBD/16-finish-smartref-implementation)

I'm currently working on smart ptrs/refs, which will still take 1-2 full
days of work.
The complexity increased about twofold b/c of the need to hack around
attribute inference deficiencies, i.e. make the destructor of Unique
@nogc nothrow depending on the dtor of the payload. It's additionally
complicated by support for polymorphic conversion and the fact that base
classes might not have a dtor.
https://github.com/MartinNowak/phobos/commits/smartRefs

Maybe move that feature (or the attributes or the polymorphic
conversions) to 2.069 instead?

- Add support for classes to RefCounted.
(https://trello.com/c/c9HFOaBg/2-add-support-for-classes-to-refcounted)
- Overhaul Unique. (https://trello.com/c/l92LIsTh/3-overhaul-unique)

Merged with Finish SmartRef Implementation
(https://trello.com/c/pTlDuyBD/16-finish-smartref-implementation).
We need a holistic approach to smart ptrs, not partial/unsynchronized
work on Unique and RefCounted. That should also include support for weak
references.

- Investigate compiler slowdown
(https://trello.com/c/L0nV131G/17-investigate-compiler-slowdown).

I proposed an idea for a generic fix of the underlying problem.
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14431#c12

Kenji made a PR that seems to at least mitigate the slowdown, haven't
yet reviewed it.

- Beta Building/Testing 2.068.0
(https://trello.com/c/8s6zLaMV/14-beta-building-testing-2-068-0)

Building the next beta. Support for beta testing.

- Finish/Approve/Merge Renamings for 2.068.0
(https://trello.com/c/zcywqyAA/18-finish-approve-merge-renamings-for-2-068-0)

Waiting for Andrei or Walter.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3454

- Rangified functions no longer accept types that implicitly cast to
string
(https://trello.com/c/jtYFpydm/19-rangified-functions-no-longer-accept-types-that-implicitly-cast-to-string)

Important fix before the rangified phobos algos can be released.
Ideally Walter would do it.
Why was this resolution delayed until now?
The issue was know since almost the first rangifying PR.

- Thread cache for GC.
(https://trello.com/c/K7HrSnwo/28-thread-cache-for-gc)

Moved to backlog, no time to finish for 2.068

- Fix binary size for tempFile
(https://trello.com/c/jtmRtrHD/29-fix-binary-size-for-tempfile)

Ditto

=================================================================================

That's it from my side

-Martin

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