DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
Well. For the first time in all my years of using these forums, I've managed to post something that exceeds the byte limit. You'll find the September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary at the following link: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Well. For the first time in all my years of using these forums, I've managed to post something that exceeds the byte limit. You'll find the September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary at the following link: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 Two notes: - Making the build bit of build.d simpler would be nice although reading the source code will reveal that it doesn't just build the compiler. - I think Martin is wrong about not upstreaming stuff from LDC into DMD. Nothing good will come of them diverging (which they already have). The UX of having multiple compilers is already terrible — conservatively let's estimate that "oh you need to download LDC if you want a compiler with an optimizer that works to a modern standard" halves the number of people bothering to try D. Every little detail that you have to think about other than actually writing code hurts D both in terms of adoption and massive fragmentation of the projects people have to contribute to. Standardising proper hooks such that LDC doesn't have to use a fork of the frontend (it's not really dmd-as-a-library in any sense that would be tolerated for a smaller project) is also important dogfooding for the frontend as a codebase.
Beerconf November
# BEERCONF! This month we will be having beerconf in 2 weeks on November 25-26. Online as usual, hope to see you all there! The usual post for the official beerconf t-shirt: https://www.zazzle.com/store/dlang_swag/products?cg=196874696466206954 ## What is beerconf? Check out the [wiki article](https://wiki.dlang.org/Beerconf). ## Presentations? If you want to give a presentation, please let me know either by email or discord or slack. I will make sure to announce it here! Cheers! 🍺 -Steve
Re: Beerconf November
On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 20:59:57 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: # BEERCONF! This month we will be having beerconf in 2 weeks on November 25-26. Online as usual, hope to see you all there! The usual post for the official beerconf t-shirt: https://www.zazzle.com/store/dlang_swag/products?cg=196874696466206954 ## What is beerconf? Check out the [wiki article](https://wiki.dlang.org/Beerconf). ## Presentations? If you want to give a presentation, please let me know either by email or discord or slack. I will make sure to announce it here! Cheers! 🍺 -Steve At last beerconf was discussion that last week of the month is always under pressure of deadlines and plans.. There were proposals to postpone it in the middle of the month
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 There was a side discussion about how the `extern(C++)` interface affects dmd-as-a-library. Personally, my number-one complaint with dmd-as-a-library is that I am forced to use `extern(C++)` when creating my own `Visitor` classes. In [`dmdtags`][1], this requirement has made it necessary for me to implement my own C++-compatible [`Span`][2] and [`Appender`][3] types, just to avoid the C++ mangling errors caused by D's built-in `T[]` slices. I have no use for overriding AST nodes, but the ability to use `extern(D)` visitors with dmd-as-a-library would be a welcome improvement. [1]: https://code.dlang.org/packages/dmdtags [2]: https://github.com/pbackus/dmdtags/blob/v1.1.1/src/dmdtags/span.d [3]: https://github.com/pbackus/dmdtags/blob/v1.1.1/src/dmdtags/appender.d
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
Part of the problem with shared is that it is completely inverse of what it should be. It fundamentally does not annotate memory with anything extra that is useful. At the CPU level there are no guarantees that memory is mapped only to one thread, nor at the language level. Therefore all memory is shared between threads. As long as people have this inverted mindset in place and instead of wanting to prove its thread owned shared is going to be a problem for us. Remove shared, add atomic storage class. Figure out thread owned/shared memory some other day.
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 I can't access it,please post it here.
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 00:55:37 UTC, zjh wrote: On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 I can't access it,please post it here. https://paste.myst.rs/u074ali8
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 00:55:37 UTC, zjh wrote: On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 I can't access it,please post it here. I can't. It's too big. That's why I posted it there.
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 03:07:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 00:55:37 UTC, zjh wrote: On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 I can't access it,please post it here. I can't. It's too big. That's why I posted it there. Well maybe splitting in 2 parts? - Let's try: Part 1: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary The D Language Foundation's monthly meeting for September 2023 took place on Friday the 15th at 15:00 UTC. After we'd had one of our shortest meetings ever the previous month, this one was a bit of a long one, lasting a little over two hours. Note that this was Timon Gehr's first time joining us for a monthly. I'd spoken with him at DConf, and he'd expressed interest in joining both our monthlies and our planning sessions when he has the time for them. I'll be inviting him as a permanent member as long as he's willing to be one. The Attendees The following people attended the meeting: Walter Bright Timon Gehr Martin Kinkelin Dennis Korpel Mathias Lang Átila Neves Razvan Nitu Mike Parker Adam D. Ruppe Robert Schadek Steven Schveighoffer Robert Robert got us started by letting us know he had done some preliminary JSON 5 work at DConf. He also gave an update on his script for the Bugzilla to GitHub migration. He had changed it to use a "hidden" API that someone from GitHub revealed to him when he reached out for assistance. Though there are still rate limits to deal with, his script was now much faster. The previous script would have taken days to migrate the dmd issues, but for a test run, he was able to do it in one sitting at DConf. He was ready to show me how to use it so I could test it and provide him with feedback. Other than that, he'd done a few small things on DScanner and was waiting on Jan Jurzitza (Webfreak) to merge them. He noted that Walter had asked him to write an article for the blog related to his DConf talk. Robert had an idea for an article related to the DScanner updates to supplement the talk. (UPDATE: During a subsequent planning session, Robert reminded me that the only reason I had volunteered to do the migration was that he didn't have admin access to our repositories. That was easily rectified. He will now be doing the migration. At our most recent planning session, we talked about a migration plan. Before taking any steps, he's going to chat with Vladimir Panteleev. Vladimir raised several concerns with me a while back about the Dlang bot and other things the migration might affect. Robert wants to get up to speed with all of that before moving forward.) Me I told everyone I'd just gotten home from my DConf/vacation trip two days before the meeting and had spent a chunk of that time decompressing. I did manage to get a little bit of post-DConf admin out of the way the night before by going through all the receipts from everyone eligible for reimbursement to let them know how much was due to them. I went into some details on how I was going to make those payments. The big news there was that we managed to get enough in revenue from registrations and sponsorships that we came in under budget, i.e., the amount Symmetry needed to send us to make up the difference was less than the total they'd allocated for reimbursements. (Thanks to Ahrefs, Ucora, Decard, Funkwerk, and Weka for helping out with that!) I then reported that I'd started editing Saeed's video. The venue had provided me access to all of their footage this year. Last year, they only gave me footage from one camera and wanted us to pay extra for more. This year, I have footage from three cameras ('main', 'wide', and 'left') as well as the video feed of the slides. Next, I noted that John Colvin and I had participated in an after-action meeting with Sarah and Eden from Brightspace, our event planners (if you were at DConf, Eden was the young woman sitting out front all four days, and Sarah was with her on the first day). We all agreed that, aside from the unfortunate laptop theft and COVID outbreak, the mechanics of the conference went well this year. We went through some feedback we'd received to discuss how to improve things next year (more info on badges, an actual registration form to get that info, etc.), and tossed around some ideas on how to prevent future thefts and mitigate the risk of COVID outbreaks. One thing we agreed on there is to have an extra person at the door whose main job is to check badges. There will surely be other steps to take once we consult with the venue. They're evaluating what measures they can take to avoid a repeat at any event they host. I also let everyone know what Sarah said about our community. Due to disruptions at Heathrow at the start of the conference, several attendees found themselves with canceled flights. A numbe
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 04:46:07 UTC, matheus wrote: ... Part 2: AST nodes in dmd-as-a-library Since DConf, Razvan had been considering how dmd-as-a-library could offer the possibility to override any kind of AST. He gave us this example of the expression class hierarchy used by the AST implementation: module expression; import std.stdio; class Expression {} class BinExp : Expression { void fun() { writeln("expression.fun"); BinExp p = new BinExp(); Expression e = new Expression(); } } class BinAssignExp : BinExp {} class AddAssignExp : BinAssignExp { override void fun() { writeln("AddAssignExp"); } } class MulAssignExp : BinAssignExp {} Then in ast_family.d, the default ASTCodegen looks like this: struct ASTCodegen { public import expression; } To create a custom AST and override the default behavior of e.g., BinExp, you need to do something like this: struct MyAST { import expression; import std.stdio; alias Expression = expression.Expression; class MyBinExp : expression.BinExp { override void fun() { writeln("MyBinExp.fun"); } } alias BinExp = MyBinExp; alias BinAssignExp = ? } The problem with this is that you now have to declare all of the AST nodes that inherit from BinExp so that they use your custom implementation. This is not a workable solution. We need the ability to specify not only that we're overriding a particular node, but that other nodes need to use it. First, he thought about templating the AST nodes and inheriting from the templated version, but that means heavily modifying the compiler. Then he came up with a solution using mixins. You just mixin the code of the AST node that you want. With this approach, the AST nodes are now mixin templates: module expression_mixins; import std.stdio; mixin template Epression_code() { class Expression {} } mixin template BinExp_code() { class BinExp : Expression { void fun() { writeln("expression.fun"); BinExp p = new BinExp(); Expression e = new Expression(); } } } mixin template BinAssignExp_code() { class BinAssignExp : BinExp {} } mixin template AddAssignExp_code() { class AddAssignExp : BinAssignExp { override void fun() { writeln("AddAssignExp"); } } } mixin template MulAssignExp_code() { class MulAssignExp : BinAssignExp {} } And then the expression module becomes: module expression; import expression_mixins; import std.stdio; mixin Expression_code(); mixin BinExp_code(); mixin BinAssignExp_code(); mixin AddAssignExp_code(); mixin MulAssignExp_code(); In ast_family, ASTCodegen remains the same, but now you can do this for your custom AST: struct MyAst { import expression_mixins; import std.stdio; mixin Expression_code(); mixin BinExp_code() t; class MyBinExp : t.BinExp { override void fun() { writeln("MyBinExp.fun"); } } alias BinExp = MyBinExp; mixin BinAssignExp_code(); mixin AddAssignExp_code(); mixin MulAssignExp_code(); } We could have something in the frontend library to generate the boilerplate automatically. But the main thing is that now you can replace any default node in the hierarchy with your custom implementation without needing to redeclare everything. In this example, everything that inherits from BinExp is now going to inherit from MyBinExp instead. This works. He showed a runnable example. He doesn't think this is that ugly. And for what it gives us, basically a pluggable AST, any perceived ugliness is worth it. He said it would be great if we could reach a consensus on how to go forward. Átila said he liked it. Razvan noted that a problem is that the semantic routine visitors aren't going to work anymore. But the cool thing is you can also put those in mixins. You mix those in with your custom AST, you inherit from and override whatever visiting nodes you want, and you get all of the functionality you need. Timon said his main concern with this kind of scheme is that he has tried them in the past, and usually dmd dies when it tries to build itself. He thinks the current version of dmd will choke on this at some point. It always appears to work at the start, but if you scale it up enough, random stuff starts to break, like an "undefined identifier string", a general forward reference error, or an ICE, etc. Razvan said he had encountered the undefined identifier thing, but you can work around that by inserting an alias in the problem spot. Regardless, he argued that any such error is a compiler bug that needs to be fixed. Timon agreed, but his question was how do you navigate that when the compiler can't build itself because of a compiler bug? Razvan said he'd fix the bug. Dennis noted tha
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 04:46:44 UTC, matheus wrote: ... Part 3: Átila Átila said he'd asked Roy after DConf if he wanted to write a spec for the new shared semantics but hadn't yet received a reply. He thought we could go ahead with it anyway, as it's probably going to be obvious in all the cases what we should do. He'd also been thinking about Robert's suggestions regarding safe code, and the more he'd done so, the more they made sense. He didn't think we needed to wait for editions, because then we could solve all the problems we've had with DIP 1000, possibly in one fell swoop. The whole issue was we were making people have to add scope everywhere because they use @safe, even if the functions weren't doing anything "unscopey". They wouldn't have to anymore because it would only apply to @trusted. He thought we should go ahead with that, too. Another thing: he'd been trying to play around with Timon's idea of pointers that have a compile-time enum saying if they're isolated or not. He wanted to do a proof of concept with a vector type and some allocators to see what that looks like. That might inform some decisions on how to add isolated to the language. He'd also been thinking about how we could do editions. I brought up an email Átila had sent recently about what features should go in the next edition. I suggested that's not what we need to be thinking about right now. We should first define exactly how editions were going to be implemented. For example, Walter had suggested the approach of attaching editions to module declarations. There are other possibilities. So we need to define what that looks like first. We should also be thinking about which features we need to have stabilized in the current language, which is going to be the default edition. What's broken now that we're not going to fix now, but want to defer until the first new edition? Átila agreed. He said he'd wanted to know what we could maybe do with the new edition so that it could inform what potential issues could arise rather than dealing with it in the abstract. It's more because of that. Not even, "that's what we're going to do", but "what would we do if we could do anything" so that we could think of what could go wrong. I thought this should be a high priority for us. I proposed that we put it on the agenda of our next planning session. Everyone agreed. (SPOILER: I'll post the September planning update a day or so after this summary, but in that session, we agreed that Átila would write up the proposal for editions by November 1st. We've since extended that to December.) Before yielding his time, Átila said he'd like to write a program that fetches all of the dub packages and checks which ones still built so he could get a list of stuff we need to test the kinds of modifications like the shared and safe stuff, along with as many future dub packages as possible, instead of the hand-selected, curated list we have now. Dennis thought even Phobos would break. He said that DIP 1000 was not a breaking change. The breaking change was fixing the accepts invalid bug that, so far, slicing a local static array has been allowed. Robert's proposal was strictly more breakage than DIP 1000. Átila said he understood that, but that code was obviously wrong anyway. The code was broken. It's just that the compiler didn't tell people. And the issue with DIP 1000 was adoption. The issue with that was having to add scope everywhere. I said that's the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. If fixing shared or scope or anything was going to break a lot of code, shouldn't we defer fixing them to a new edition and not do it in the default language? Walter said DIP 1000 clearly had to be in an edition. Átila said, "Okay." But the shared thing is a no-brainer. The code is completely wrong and we're not going to break anything by lowering it to atomics. Walter agreed. Timon asked if the idea is to do operations on shared variables atomically. Walter said yes, for the ones where the CPU supports an atomic operation. If the CPU doesn't support an atomic operation on a variable, then it will not be allowed. It varies by target. Timon said yes, but an atomic operation is not the only way to synchronize something. Átila said that's true, but the thing is, there's always an opt-out by casting away shared yourself. If you're going to do something to shared directly, you should either pass it to a function that takes shared, or cast it away and lock a mutex, or whatever you want. Timon brought up Manu's push to just reject all of those operations. Átila said that doesn't work. He'd been trying to fix it this year and it's been one bug after another. Timon asked what the issue with that was. Átila said there were many, but gave one example: synchronized(mutex) doesn't compile with -preview=nosharedaccess because you're accessing the mutex. The runtime do
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 03:07:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 I can't access it,please post it here. I can't. It's too big. That's why I posted it there. I can't access `https://gist.github.com`, Anyway, thank you for `your efforts`.
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 02:23:22 UTC, Imperatorn wrote: https://paste.myst.rs/u074ali8 Thank you,Have a nice day!
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 04:47:42 UTC, matheus wrote: That's it! Matheus. Thank you, Matheus.Have a nice day.
Re: DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary
On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Well. For the first time in all my years of using these forums, I've managed to post something that exceeds the byte limit. You'll find the September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary at the following link: https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581 Thank you for posting. As always, it's interesting read. And it's great for the community to get the feeling for what's happening. Nice to see that people such as Adam and Timon joined these discussions recently. Topic-wise, I would be interested in how the "shared" is going to be shaped. Especially, I remember Manu advocating for a quite simple in principle approach to it, but he never got to much positive vibes from the community. I noticed his suggestions mentioned in the summary notes of the DLF meeting, and wondered whether some of those ideas will be part of the discussion.