October 05, 2015
On Friday, 2 October 2015 at 11:25:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Walter and I will travel to Brasov, Romania to hold an evening-long event on the D language. There's been strong interest in the event with over 300 registrants so far.
>
> http://curiousminds.ro
>
> Scott Meyers will guest star in a panel following the talks. We're all looking forward to it!

Not going to miss this opportunity!

But... all this sure is confusing (at least for a non-regular-conference-goer).

Registration is free, OK, so what's the catch? Maybe attendance isn't? Or are we expected to stay at Hotel Kronwell? :)

I filled in the "join for free" form, but all I got is confirmation that I subscribed to a mailing list... no confirmation of registration or anything...

And with over 300 registrants 3 days ago, there is no feedback on whether the conference is booked out or anything!

October 05, 2015
On Friday, 2 October 2015 at 13:30:46 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 10/02/2015 08:01 AM, Per Nordlöw wrote:
>>
>> Will there be video recordings?
>
> I don't think so. -- Andrei

Can you at least get an audio recording?
October 06, 2015
On 10/5/15 4:10 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 2 October 2015 at 11:25:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Walter and I will travel to Brasov, Romania to hold an evening-long
>> event on the D language. There's been strong interest in the event
>> with over 300 registrants so far.
>>
>> http://curiousminds.ro
>>
>> Scott Meyers will guest star in a panel following the talks. We're all
>> looking forward to it!
>
> Not going to miss this opportunity!
>
> But... all this sure is confusing (at least for a
> non-regular-conference-goer).
>
> Registration is free, OK, so what's the catch? Maybe attendance isn't?
> Or are we expected to stay at Hotel Kronwell? :)
>
> I filled in the "join for free" form, but all I got is confirmation that
> I subscribed to a mailing list... no confirmation of registration or
> anything...
>
> And with over 300 registrants 3 days ago, there is no feedback on
> whether the conference is booked out or anything!

The event is sponsored by Siemens and free for the audience. I'll relay your confusion to the organizers. -- Andrei


October 06, 2015
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:43 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> ...
>
The event is sponsored by Siemens and free for the audience. I'll relay
> your confusion to the organizers. -- Andrei
>
>
That is interesting, do you know how Siemens ended up being the sponsor?


October 06, 2015
On 10/6/15 8:42 AM, Rory McGuire via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:43 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu via
> Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com
> <mailto:digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com>> wrote:
>
>     ...
>
>     The event is sponsored by Siemens and free for the audience. I'll
>     relay your confusion to the organizers. -- Andrei
>
>
> That is interesting, do you know how Siemens ended up being the sponsor?

Far as I can tell it's the other way around: we ended up being invited :o). Siemens is sponsoring the ongoing curiousminds.ro conferences, and they contacted us with the idea of holding the event. -- Andrei

October 09, 2015
On Monday, 5 October 2015 at 14:10:43 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 2 October 2015 at 11:25:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Walter and I will travel to Brasov, Romania to hold an evening-long event on the D language. There's been strong interest in the event with over 300 registrants so far.
>>
>> http://curiousminds.ro
>>
>> Scott Meyers will guest star in a panel following the talks. We're all looking forward to it!
>
> Not going to miss this opportunity!

I'm here! Who else is?
October 14, 2015
On Monday, 5 October 2015 at 14:10:43 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> Not going to miss this opportunity!

Since I was apparently the only forum regular in the audience, figured I should post a follow-up.

First, the event was recorded. There was a professional A/V studio working with multiple cameras, additional lighting, the works (though they did have some audio problems in the beginning). Andrei confirmed that the recordings will be published.

The audience was packed - 400 people in total. Quite amazing. I did not recognize anyone, which on the other hand is great because the event reached 399 people new to D :) Also the % of women was much higher than the past DConfs I've attended. There were a few people in the audience familiar with recent/untraditional programming languages (Rust, Nim, Haskell) so there was some nice dialogue at times (Andrei had to impose a budget on the first 5 rows to get the rest of the audience to participate).

The event was organized very well considering the audience size and free attendance. There were free t-shirts, beverages, snacks, and even beer at the end - very nice of Siemens.

The talks:

The schedule was rearranged a bit, so it doesn't quite correspond to the one on the website (or I might be just misremembering). IIRC, the order was: welcome address, "Three cool things about D" by Andrei, "Interfacing D to legacy C++ code" by Walter, "Writing quick code, quickly" by Andrei, followed by the panel.

Andrei's first talk was mainly concerning with "pure", its variants (strong/weak), rules and benefits, as well as a quick description of CTFE and the famous ctRegex benchmark where D beats everything else. I'm not sure if some slides were skipped over due to time constraints.

Walter's talk was about how D was extended to gradually support more ways to interface with C++ (class/vtable layouts, namespaces, extern(C++), name mangling etc.) and how it helped DDMD.

Andrei's second talk, "Writing quick code, quickly" was not related to D, but I enjoyed it immensely. It covers some interesting optimization problems with some surprising solutions. I highly recommend watching this.

Finally, there was the panel with Scott Meyers. This included a book giveaway for the most embarrassing questions, of which there were many. A big part of the audience had left at this point though, as it was getting late. Many questions concerned D's ecosystem, e.g. whether we have good debugging GUIs for all platforms, which we don't for OS X. The books were TDPL (the rare edition with no author on the cover), Ali's D book, and a C++ book by either Andrei or Scott (unfortunately I do not remember), all signed by their authors.

This was all for the conference. We took the rest of the weekend to tour Brașov and do some sightseeing. The most striking thing about the city is the number of roundabouts - probably 90% of intersections were replaced by them! If you're around, do make sure to make the climb to the mountain looming above the old city (or just take the cable car), the view is awesome.

October 14, 2015
Thank you very much for the summary! It was very informative.

On 10/14/2015 03:54 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

> Andrei's second talk, "Writing quick code, quickly" was not related to
> D, but I enjoyed it immensely. It covers some interesting optimization
> problems with some surprising solutions. I highly recommend watching this.

Was it a version of the following talk by any chance?

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq_WaiwzOtI

> Ali's D book [...] signed by their authors

Yay! :D I am glad that Andrei or Walter was able to save one copy for that event.

Ali

October 14, 2015
On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 22:54:40 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> First, the event was recorded. There was a professional A/V studio working with multiple cameras, additional lighting, the works (though they did have some audio problems in the beginning). Andrei confirmed that the recordings will be published.
>

Super good news.

> The audience was packed - 400 people in total. Quite amazing. I did not recognize anyone, which on the other hand is great because the event reached 399 people new to D :) Also the % of women was much higher than the past DConfs I've attended. There were a few people in the audience familiar with recent/untraditional programming languages (Rust, Nim, Haskell) so there was some nice dialogue at times (Andrei had to impose a budget on the first 5 rows to get the rest of the audience to participate).
>

Super good news as well :)

> Andrei's first talk was mainly concerning with "pure", its variants (strong/weak), rules and benefits, as well as a quick description of CTFE and the famous ctRegex benchmark where D beats everything else. I'm not sure if some slides were skipped over due to time constraints.
>

I think I've seen that one so many time I could do it myself :)

> Walter's talk was about how D was extended to gradually support more ways to interface with C++ (class/vtable layouts, namespaces, extern(C++), name mangling etc.) and how it helped DDMD.
>

DO WANT :)

> This was all for the conference. We took the rest of the weekend to tour Brașov and do some sightseeing. The most striking thing about the city is the number of roundabouts - probably 90% of intersections were replaced by them! If you're around, do make sure to make the climb to the mountain looming above the old city (or just take the cable car), the view is awesome.

The city I originally come from is well know for its overuse of roundabout as well, preferably all the most confusing forms they can exist, like this : http://www.lacaravane.com/photos/double-rondpoint-Nantes.jpg or that : https://inconvenantes.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/rond-point-bouche-dc3a9vier.jpg
October 14, 2015
On Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 23:06:14 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> Thank you very much for the summary! It was very informative.
>
> On 10/14/2015 03:54 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
> > Andrei's second talk, "Writing quick code, quickly" was not
> related to
> > D, but I enjoyed it immensely. It covers some interesting
> optimization
> > problems with some surprising solutions. I highly recommend
> watching this.
>
> Was it a version of the following talk by any chance?
>
>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq_WaiwzOtI

Skimming through that, it looks like a completely different talk (also very interesting)! Will watch that too.