January 18, 2021

Core D Development Statistics

• 9 bugs fixed
• 10 bugs and enhancement requests opened
• 27 pull requests merged into the language: 18 into DMD, 3 into Phobos, and 6 into druntime.
• 1 pull requests merged into the website.

In the community

Community announcements

• Please Congratulate My New Assistant
• Beerconf January 2021
• styx, a programming languange written in D, is on the bootstrap path
• Say Hello to Our Two New Pull-Request/Issue Managers
• Symmetry Investments and the D Language Foundation are Hiring
• Tutorial: Building a simple Web server with arsd CGI framework

See more at the announce forum.

What Adam is working on

cgi.d request content type

The arsd.cgi request type code is improved from a bug here: https://github.com/adamdruppe/arsd/issues/271

Before, it would throw an exception on types outside its arbitrary hardcoded list. Now, it forwards the information to the application.

simpledisplay.d operating system font

The OperatingSystemFont class now has better width detection features and handles fallback fonts for missing character sets more gracefully.

I'm slowly working toward the new text edit class and its associated support.

terminal.d embedded emulator

The getline feature now handles a few more key shortcuts and the default font is now a fancier true type font.

Future idea

At some point, I need to make some websites for small groups. While one option is to just slap together a quick simple set of html, or an off-the-shelf cms, or whatever boring thing.

But I have a better idea: I wanna make a D cms anyway, and I have a possible angle: make it kinda specialized for committees or other groups that need some degree of democratic agreement to update the site.

The flow I envision is similar to a pull request we coders are used to, but more integrated in website content. If you're logged in as an authorized contributor, you can hit the edit button and make some changes. When you're done, you'd hit save, but instead of immediately updating the site, it just saves it as a proposal.

Then other members can log in and see the proposed changes and approve or reject them. After the criteria pass (perhaps a certain number of "yes" votes, and/or a period of time passes, or whatever), then it can go live.

Frequently, small organizations like this have a meeting where they work out an idea, then approve it and pass it off to someone (frequently a secretary - many programmers are surprised to learn how many websites are actually maintained by people who aren't traditional IT pros, though it might indeed be an IT department or whatever too). That someone implements it then maybe passes back to the boss to give final approval and it goes live.

The idea of this CMS would be to streamline that process. Otherwise, it'd probably just be a pretty basic feature set.

Then I can give it to the small groups I know who want a website and possibly use it as a new wiki-style thing for my docs too. And, of course, the project itself will be a small demo of my web libs.

Don't expect much soon, this is a little side project that might take months to get around to it, but it is something now on my to do list. Along with about ten million other things.