January 10, 2022

Core D Development Statistics

• 7 bugs fixed
• 13 bugs and enhancement requests opened
• 22 pull requests merged into the language: 10 into DMD, 8 into Phobos, and 4 into druntime.
• 4 pull requests merged into the website.

In the community

Community announcements

• fixedstring: a @safe, @nogc string type
• DIP 1042--ProtoObject--Community Review Round 1 Begins
• DMD now incorporates a disassembler
• Added copy constructors to "Programming in D"
• New Year DLang News: Hello 2022
• Error message formatter for range primitives
• WASM4 and D for retro game programming

See more at the announce forum.

Tip of the Week

Any time you alias a member, the this pointer - a piece of runtime info - is discarded in favor of compile time info. Basically, alias treats EVERYTHING as if it was static, which is fine for reflection, but when using the member, you need to reattach this.

You can do that with __traits(child, the_alias, your_this). But often, instead of aliasing members, just make a little ref helper function:

alias b = rhs.num; // not much help

ref b() { return rhs.num; }
// now you can use b() as the shorthand version

I wrote a lil more about this here: https://forum.dlang.org/post/uxpocdcztllhwaxfwdac@forum.dlang.org