Now that the last talk from DConf is up, I thought it might be a
good time to review them, as someone who didn't attend.
From the standpoint of a D conference, the worst talk was
Walter's. It was clearly aimed at a non-D audience, so there was
nothing new there for a D audience: I'm guessing it's a familiar
talk he gives to outside groups. However, as a recording on the
internet, it might be the best talk for newbies, as an
introduction to the language, as every other talk goes deeper
into the language.
I wish Walter had done a real technical talk on his experiences
developing D and dmd, as he is a font of knowledge on many
technical topics, rather than a basic overview of D. Maybe next
year, perhaps he can talk about porting dmd to D. :)
The rest of the first day's talks were interesting looks at
various technical issues. Ben loves testing a bit too much, ;) I
suspect that a distributed approach like Robert's is the future.
Didn't realize there was so much to copying and moving till I
watched Ali's talk, still not sure I grasp all of it. Good to
see a different approach to GC by Leandro.
I was underwhelmed by Manu's talk: too much low-level technical
detail about the integration effort between C++ and D, not enough
discussion of the benefits of using D. The Q&A panel with Walter
and Andrei should have been an hour, or until questions petered
out, and held every day of DConf. :)
Vladimir's talk was the highlight of the second day for me, a
great mix of technical material and exploring the current state
of related D libraries. Adam's talk was enjoyable, a nice look
at D through C# eyes. Iain and Rainer's talks were interesting;
started watching but haven't finished Martin and Maxime's talks
yet, not that interested in shared libraries or JITs but I'll
finish them later.
Don's talk was the best of the conference: great mix of technical
material, pragmatic considerations, and humor. The title was
horrible though, wasn't expecting much from a talk on
"metaprogramming," was pleasantly surprised when the topic was
barely talked about. Nice overview of SIMD by Manu and LLVM/LDC
by Nadlinger. Simcha's talk was well done but I wonder if I'd
ever use any of those higher-level patterns; good to hear what
Stefane's team is up to with static analysis.
Andrei, as usual, was very good, though there was too much
structure and boilerplate for me, however little there was
compared to his usual talk. The bits about scaling to a million
users through "professionalism" were weird for a volunteer effort
though.
All in all, a great effort, looking forward to the next one.
