This Week in D

October 4, 2021

Blog
Posted 2021-10-04

idl2d on dub, more leadership talk

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What Adam is working on

I registered this today: https://code.dlang.org/packages/idl2d

Visual D's code base had a little program to convert Microsoft IDL files into D. It isn't exactly great; you still have to do a lot of hand edits to them to make it work, but it can help you get jump started.

I extracted that utility into a separate package to make it easier to use, and I'm hoping to find some time to make it work a little better as time goes on.

You can try it now by doing dub run idl2d -- yourfile.idl.

My reaction to the DLF meeting

The de-facto leadership vacuum D has been a problem for a long time and a proposal came up to change this. Of course this did not go over well; they might be willing to entertain some kind of committee, but they refuse to give up their own power.

There's two problems we have: one is that there's just no direction. Ping people asking for input and get silence, so you don't know if work is going to be worthwhile. The other problem is things get vetoed. By itself, getting vetoed might be ok, a director has a vision to realize, but when it is combined with the silent problem, vetoes tend to come late in the process. Things get no answer, eventually someone decides to merge on the condition you do a bunch of more work, so you do it... but then it is suddenly reverted a month later.

You can imagine how obnoxious this is.

Fixing this problem won't be done with a committee that is still subject to uncommunicated whims. The good news of that is it should actually create some more communication and perhaps spur movement. But the bad news is you can still get reverted without notice or recourse randomly after the fact. That needs to change or the process will fail to achieve its goals.

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