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Because D was originally created by a C++ compiler writer, Walter Bright, it’s an easy language for C and C++ programmers to learn, but there are little differences in the way declarations work. I learned them piecemeal in different places, but I’m going to dump a bunch in this one post.
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TL;DR: I’ve translated Python’s urllib.parse to D for parsing, building and transforming URLs.
You can get it from Gitlab.
URL handling is one of those things that most of the time can be done with a regex that mostly works. But sometimes
I want a just-works tool when writing D, so I translated Python’s URL handling library. The API isn’t perfect (e.g.,
the url_split and url_parse distinction is a bit confusing), but it’s been tested against
multiple RFCs and had plenty of real-world battle hardening.
My translation is meant to give the same output as Python does, so I’ve translated the Python test suite as well. I don’t plan to add any new features that aren’t in Python.
I hope someone else finds it useful.
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In a post a few months back I said it’s a popular
myth that const is helpful for enabling compiler
optimisations in C and C++. I figured I should explain that one, especially because I used to believe it was
obviously true, myself. I’ll start off with some theory and artificial examples, then I’ll do some experiments and
benchmarks on a real codebase: Sqlite.
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Sircmpwn (the main developer behind the Sway Wayland compositor) recently wrote a blog post about how he thinks Rust is not a good C replacement. I don’t know if he’d like the D programming language either, but it’s become a C replacement for me.
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Here’s a tutorial about using Emscripten to run D code in a normal web browser. It’s uses a different approach from the Dscripten game demo and the dscripten-tools toolchain that’s based on it.
-betterC build.LDC has recently gained support for compiling directly to WebAssembly, but (unlike the Emscripten approach) that doesn’t automatically get you libraries.
You can find the complete working code on Github.
./run.sh starts a shell in a Docker image that contains the
development environment. dub build --build=release generates
the HTML and JavaScript assets and puts them into the dist/
directory.
This tutorial is translated from a Japanese post by outlandkarasu, who deserves all the credit for figuring this stuff out.
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Translations:русский
Here’s a little story of some mysterious server failures I had to debug a year ago. The servers would run okay for a while, then eventually start crashing. After that, trying to run practically anything on the machines failed with “No space left on device” errors, but the filesystem only reported a few gigabytes of files on the ~20GB disks.
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I’ve promised to write a blog post about the DIY polymorphic classes implementation in Xanthe, the experimental game I once wrote for bare-metal X86. But first, I decided to write a precursor post that explains how polymorphism and inheritance work in the first place.
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NB: This post is just a translation (with some extra comments by me). Credit goes to the original and the C code generator that inspired it.
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This year’s qualification problems were all straightforward puzzles. None of them needed sophisticated implementation techniques, or advanced algorithms, or complex data structures. They just needed patient analysis and careful coding. That’s nice from one perspective, but unfortunately it’s hard to make a good comparison of programming languages when every problem can be solved with just loops and arrays. Still, I succeeded in my goal of producing every output with a different (sometimes terrible) language.
Here’s my code and commentary on the problems. Warning: spoilers ahead. If you haven’t looked at the problems yet, go do that first.
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Functional purity is a valuable concept for writing maintainable code, though outside of functional programming languages like Haskell, it’s often treated like a nice-but-expensive luxury. But it turns out that pure functions that aren’t quite so pure can be cheap while still having concrete benefits for code in non-functional languages like C++, Java and Python. For D code, this is supported by the language itself, but there’s nothing D-specific about the overall idea.