As you might remember, I worked on adding D support to Apache
Thrift [1] during Google Summer of Code 2011. A few months (and
DMD releases) down the road, the patch was finally submitted to
Thrift upstream [2], with the test suite passing on all of
Windows, Linux and OS X.
The problem now is that while there is definitely interest in
using D with Thrift, the upstream team is (unsurprisingly,
perhaps) lacking people who know D well enough to review the
almost 24k LOC patch. Thus, the patch has been sitting in the
Apache JIRA for almost two months now.
So, if you are interested in Thrift or already have some
experience with it, it'd be great if you could have a look at the
code and let me (and the Thrift issue tracker, of course), know
what you think. You should be able to find anything needed from
the ticket [2], let me know if something is missing.
———
What the library doesn't have (yet):
- @safe-ty annotations (pure doesn't apply to most of the code):
I tried to add them a while back, but hit some unpleasant
compiler bugs.
- Compile-time Thrift IDL parsing: While most of the codegen is
done at D compile time anyway, having the interface file parser
in CTFE as well wasn't really feasible when GSoC started (before
Don's rewrite), and integration with the main Thrift compiler
would have been required in any case. Now, a CTFE implementation
might be a nice use case of one of the CTFE parsing libraries,
though (the current code generator is only 700 lines of C++, plus
parser), if you want to tackle this, let me know.
- A HashSet implementation in Phobos it could generate code
against; currently, a void[0]-AA-based hack is used. I've been
meaning to look into adding something to std.container for ages
now, but with me being swamped in work and the container design
being »in flux« (e.g. allocators)…
- While I implemented a feature to generate Thrift IDL from
existing D structs and interfaces at compile time (now that is
cool), which can do a round-trip for all Thrift-generated code,
it probably breaks in the face of real-world D code – please
use it, break it, and ideally fix it. ;)
– There are lots of cool ideas for D-specific features which
could be added, for example a Thrift server which maps RPC
requests to std.concurrency messages, etc. So far, I mostly
concentrated on providing the parts which Thrift users expect to
be there, i.e. which the C++ and Java implementations also offer.
This also involves a slightly non-idiomatic design in some
places, which is unfortunate, but Thrift generally strives to
find a good balance between offering a »native« feel in each
target language and cross-language consistency.
———
Thanks,
David
[1] http://thrift.apache.org/
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-1500
