Apologies if this is the wrong forum or even the wrong place but it seems to me there is a kind of tight connection between dlang and dsource.org (to which the following relates).

I can perfectly well understand that any group around a not yet globally known language with a not yet richly endowed assortment of libraries isn't eager to push the kill button on 3rd party/user created modules.

And yes, it sure gives a new user a warm nice feeling to discover lots of available modules (which after all translates to a quick start and efficiency for many taskS).

Let me, however, also share my experience and feelings as a (exited and pleased) newbie to D when one finds out that what seems to be easily 2/3rd of seemingly available modules are "dead, exitus, this bird is passed away, gone, dead, and only sitting there because someone drove a nail through the poor animal" or, at best optimistically pre-early-alpha (speaking with a friendly grin).

Feels like a 16 ton weight coming down (if I may borrow again from Python, here).

And there is another unpleasant side effect: It doesn't feel profoundly attractive to write something and put it in between all those dead parrots.

I'd like to suggest therefore that we begin to mildly weed out dead or stuck-in-dream stage modules or at least discreetly mark them as RIP.

In case someone is interested in what disappointed me most, it's hto2 and bcd-gen, bot of which address an important need and both of which don't look healthy and useful.
This is particularly troublesome as "make C libs work in D" type tools are essential in any effort to bring D forward in the world out there.

In case someone feels like hitting me: Hold it. This thread was written with good intention and the honest worry that a lack of libs and a lack of some support for bringing in C stuff might turn out to be regrettable bumps in the road.

A+ -R

On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 01:13:15 UTC, Ramon wrote:
> Apologies if this is the wrong forum or even the wrong place but it seems to me there is a kind of tight connection between dlang and dsource.org (to which the following relates).
>
> I can perfectly well understand that any group around a not yet globally known language with a not yet richly endowed assortment of libraries isn't eager to push the kill button on 3rd party/user created modules.
>
> And yes, it sure gives a new user a warm nice feeling to discover lots of available modules (which after all translates to a quick start and efficiency for many taskS).
>
> Let me, however, also share my experience and feelings as a (exited and pleased) newbie to D when one finds out that what seems to be easily 2/3rd of seemingly available modules are "dead, exitus, this bird is passed away, gone, dead, and only sitting there because someone drove a nail through the poor animal" or, at best optimistically pre-early-alpha (speaking with a friendly grin).
>
> Feels like a 16 ton weight coming down (if I may borrow again from Python, here).
>
> And there is another unpleasant side effect: It doesn't feel profoundly attractive to write something and put it in between all those dead parrots.
>
> I'd like to suggest therefore that we begin to mildly weed out dead or stuck-in-dream stage modules or at least discreetly mark them as RIP.
>
> In case someone is interested in what disappointed me most, it's hto2 and bcd-gen, bot of which address an important need and both of which don't look healthy and useful.
> This is particularly troublesome as "make C libs work in D" type tools are essential in any effort to bring D forward in the world out there.
>
> In case someone feels like hitting me: Hold it. This thread was written with good intention and the honest worry that a lack of libs and a lack of some support for bringing in C stuff might turn out to be regrettable bumps in the road.
>
> A+ -R

I agree we do need to deal with older projects. However I don't think we can.
Instead maybe we should work towards keeping the wiki up to date with notable projects?

With regards to c libraries maybe it would be a good idea to implement a shared library function loader for phobos itself. That would mean both shared libraries and static libraries are very easy to implement.
There is e.g. DerelictUtil[0] which provides it if you want it however.

With regards to making a converter for between C/D bindings. There is SWIG but I have yet to get that to work well either.
Maybe someone else can elaborate more on this side of things.

I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month I've been having a real good play around with OpengGL and creating my own library [1].
There is also a few tools missing here and there. For example the conversion of binary assets to D arrays [2]. Works, but not the best.

I know I'm advertising some of my own projects here but I think it's relevant to point out my own experience.

Another area that does need some work is database connectivity. I did make some bindings to OpenDBX[3]. Which I need to redo as of Derelict3 being split up.
I might get that into DUB if somebody wants it.
OpenDBX[4] has multiple database interfaces using a common api.
We do have sqlite bindings in Phobos however and sqlite itself bundled with dmd (not zip on Windows I believe however).

On that note DUB[5] is becoming quite "community official" build manager.
These packages _should_ all be up to date however we may need to focus on that?
Somebody else should suggest regarding this as I haven't got experience on it yet. This may solve the issue you mentioned with dsource.

[0] https://github.com/DerelictOrg/DerelictUtil
[1] https://github.com/rikkimax/DOOGLE
[2] https://bitbucket.org/alphaglosined/misc-work/src/cf15ec6b1e3cf888885128b8ea5c5ce4a07f446f/Tools/Bin2D.d?at=default
[3] https://github.com/rikkimax/Derelict3-Extras/tree/master/import/derelict/opendbx
[4] http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/OpenDBX/Support
[5] http://code.dlang.org/

On 29/08/13 16:11, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the
> beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month I've
> been having a real good play around with OpengGL and creating my own
> library [1].

On this topic, I started looking at porting one of my PyGTK applications to GtkD and found that the knowledge of PyGTK API wasn't a great deal of help in this endeavor.  I think the problem is Python's "duck typing" and dynamic typing allow for a very flexible API that is much simpler than GTK+'s and GtkD's is much like GTK+'s.  The problem is complicated by the fact that the amount of documentation is huge and it's often difficult to find where something is defined.

Anyway, long story short, I've decided to investigate the feasibility of rewriting the parts of GTK+ that I like directly in D.  It's early days yet and the code is in a private repository on github.  I'll keep it private until I have some useful subset working at which time I'll make it public.  Of course, if I find that it's all too hard I'll just delete it.

Early indications are that the code will be much simpler than the original as GTK+ implements its own OOP and GC where I'll just delegate that to D. :-)

Peter

On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 06:34:23 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
> On 29/08/13 16:11, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>> I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the
>> beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month I've
>> been having a real good play around with OpengGL and creating my own
>> library [1].
>
> On this topic, I started looking at porting one of my PyGTK applications to GtkD and found that the knowledge of PyGTK API wasn't a great deal of help in this endeavor.  I think the problem is Python's "duck typing" and dynamic typing allow for a very flexible API that is much simpler than GTK+'s and GtkD's is much like GTK+'s.  The problem is complicated by the fact that the amount of documentation is huge and it's often difficult to find where something is defined.
>
> Anyway, long story short, I've decided to investigate the feasibility of rewriting the parts of GTK+ that I like directly in D.  It's early days yet and the code is in a private repository on github.  I'll keep it private until I have some useful subset working at which time I'll make it public.  Of course, if I find that it's all too hard I'll just delete it.
>
> Early indications are that the code will be much simpler than the original as GTK+ implements its own OOP and GC where I'll just delegate that to D. :-)
>
> Peter

Nice :)
Although be careful it was designed for more Posix environment.
I'm keeping DOOGLE as far limited in terms of platform dependence.
So porting is literally implement the OpenGL context creation and Window creation classes.

Also for anyone interested I'm keeping the controls that require text out of DOOGLE because of the font rasterizer dependency.

On 2013-08-29 03:13, Ramon wrote:
> Apologies if this is the wrong forum or even the wrong place but it
> seems to me there is a kind of tight connection between dlang and
> dsource.org (to which the following relates).
>
> I can perfectly well understand that any group around a not yet globally
> known language with a not yet richly endowed assortment of libraries
> isn't eager to push the kill button on 3rd party/user created modules.
>
> And yes, it sure gives a new user a warm nice feeling to discover lots
> of available modules (which after all translates to a quick start and
> efficiency for many taskS).
>
> Let me, however, also share my experience and feelings as a (exited and
> pleased) newbie to D when one finds out that what seems to be easily
> 2/3rd of seemingly available modules are "dead, exitus, this bird is
> passed away, gone, dead, and only sitting there because someone drove a
> nail through the poor animal" or, at best optimistically pre-early-alpha
> (speaking with a friendly grin).
>
> Feels like a 16 ton weight coming down (if I may borrow again from
> Python, here).

Well, dsource.org is dead. The projects are basically there for reference only. Most project these days are at Github. I guess there isn't an obvious way to find all of them though.

> And there is another unpleasant side effect: It doesn't feel profoundly
> attractive to write something and put it in between all those dead parrots.
>
> I'd like to suggest therefore that we begin to mildly weed out dead or
> stuck-in-dream stage modules or at least discreetly mark them as RIP.
>
> In case someone is interested in what disappointed me most, it's hto2
> and bcd-gen, bot of which address an important need and both of which
> don't look healthy and useful.
> This is particularly troublesome as "make C libs work in D" type tools
> are essential in any effort to bring D forward in the world out there.
>
> In case someone feels like hitting me: Hold it. This thread was written
> with good intention and the honest worry that a lack of libs and a lack
> of some support for bringing in C stuff might turn out to be regrettable
> bumps in the road.

DStep is a a tool for automatically converting C headers to D modules:

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

There's also a Github organization dedicated to C bindings, created by the D community and language authors:

https://github.com/D-Programming-Deimos/
http://jkm.github.io/d-programming-language.org/deimos.html

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Thu, 29 Aug 2013 03:13:11 +0200
"Ramon" <spam@thanks.no> wrote:
> Apologies if this is the wrong forum or even the wrong place but it seems to me there is a kind of tight connection between dlang and dsource.org (to which the following relates).
> 
[...]
> 
> Let me, however, also share my experience and feelings as a (exited and pleased) newbie to D when one finds out that what seems to be easily 2/3rd of seemingly available modules are "dead, exitus, this bird is passed away, gone, dead, and only sitting there because someone drove a nail through the poor animal" or, at best optimistically pre-early-alpha (speaking with a friendly grin).
> 

FWIW, most of the D community has moved from dsource to github. The things remaining on dsource are mostly going to be older things.

> 
> I'd like to suggest therefore that we begin to mildly weed out dead or stuck-in-dream stage modules or at least discreetly mark them as RIP.
> 

That's a very good point, I agree that may be a good thing to do.

On 2013-08-29 08:11, Rikki Cattermole wrote:

> With regards to c libraries maybe it would be a good idea to implement a
> shared library function loader for phobos itself. That would mean both
> shared libraries and static libraries are very easy to implement.
> There is e.g. DerelictUtil[0] which provides it if you want it however.

The runtime already has functions for that, although not as good as Derelict and currently only for Windows.

> With regards to making a converter for between C/D bindings. There is
> SWIG but I have yet to get that to work well either.
> Maybe someone else can elaborate more on this side of things.

And DStep:

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

> I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the
> beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month I've
> been having a real good play around with OpengGL and creating my own
> library [1].

There's DWT:

https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt

You probably want to have a look at this recent thread as well:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/phnwyavzohoptdftqfxm@forum.dlang.org

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Well, dsource.org is dead.

How would one know? I certainly didn't when as a complete D newbie I tried to find some libraries a few months ago.

> The projects are basically there for
> reference only. Most project these days are at Github. I guess there
> isn't an obvious way to find all of them though.

I'd say that's a pity and there should be some way to find them :)

-- 
Marek Janukowicz

On 8/29/2013 4:29 PM, Marek Janukowicz wrote:
> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Well, dsource.org is dead.
>
> How would one know? I certainly didn't when as a complete D newbie I tried
> to find some libraries a few months ago.

Not much anyone can do about it. The guy who maintained DSource has been inactive in the community for a long while.

On 8/29/2013 4:29 PM, Marek Janukowicz wrote:
> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Well, dsource.org is dead.
>
> How would one know? I certainly didn't when as a complete D newbie I tried
> to find some libraries a few months ago.
>
>> The projects are basically there for
>> reference only. Most project these days are at Github. I guess there
>> isn't an obvious way to find all of them though.
>
> I'd say that's a pity and there should be some way to find them :)
>
Not much anyone can do about it. The guy who maintained DSource has been inactive in the community for a long while.