So I haven't made an announcement about MiniD on the newsgroups in a long time.  MiniD recently had its first birthday (since the initial inception of the idea.. it's since changed quite a bit from that), and appropriately version 1.0 is going to be out soon as a belated birthday present.

The feature set has been frozen, so what features it has now are the 1.0 spec.  The standard library is mostly solidified -- the transition to Tango necessitated some changes in the IO model, but that's mostly been ironed out.  About the only thing that's still in flux is the native API.

The last big thing before the true 1.0 release is a Pyd-like binding library which makes it very easy to expose native D code to MiniD apps (and probably also functionality to make it easier to deal with MiniD code from the native app).  A simple example of the binding looks a bit like this:

WrapModule!
(
    "foo",
    WrapFunc!(one),
    WrapFunc!(two),
    WrapFunc!(three)
);

This will create and register a MiniD module with three functions inside it. This module can then be imported and used from MiniD code with no issue. The binding layer transparently translates between the native D types and the MiniD types; no special considerations (other than the use of convertible types for parameters and return values) have to be taken when writing the native code.

Of course this is easy but not necessarily the most performant.  It's great for quickly exposing functionality that wasn't designed for MiniD to your scripts, but if you want the best performance, you can still write native functions that are made to work with the language runtime.  The API is really starting to come into its own, and virtually anything you can do in MiniD code, you can do in native code.

Now that MiniD is Tango-based, I had another idea: use the Fiber class to allow native coroutines.  Until now, coroutines had to be script functions, as there's no way normally to suspend the execution of a native function. I've been playing around with Fiber, and I think it'll make native coroutines very doable.

In any case, once the binding library is done, and with a bit of testing, I think I'll be able to call this 1.0!

Oh, I suppose you all would like some links ;)  The main page is at http://www.dsource.org/projects/minid.  The forums are http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=94, where many announcements are posted (and if you want to start some discussion, go right ahead). Lastly I recently opened an IRC channel on freenode; it's called #d.minid.

MiniD compiles with DMD 1.0 on Windows and Linux, and depends on the latest snapshot of Tango (not the latest stable release, the very bleeding-edging-est latest).  GDC is too old to compile it, so sorry Mac users.

"Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:f633pe$1upp$1@digitalmars.com...
> MiniD compiles with DMD 1.0

I guess I should clarify this -- I mean it compiles with the D 1.0 spec compiler, something like 1.014 at the least.  It doesn't (to my knowledge) compile with the D 2.0 compiler.

Great news! :)

There is happening so much with D right now that I can't keep up...


On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:08:37 +0300, Jarrett Billingsley <kb3ctd2@yahoo.com> wrote:
> So I haven't made an announcement about MiniD on the newsgroups in a long
> time.  MiniD recently had its first birthday (since the initial inception of
> the idea.. it's since changed quite a bit from that), and appropriately
> version 1.0 is going to be out soon as a belated birthday present.
>
> The feature set has been frozen, so what features it has now are the 1.0
> spec.  The standard library is mostly solidified -- the transition to Tango
> necessitated some changes in the IO model, but that's mostly been ironed
> out.  About the only thing that's still in flux is the native API.
>
> The last big thing before the true 1.0 release is a Pyd-like binding library
> which makes it very easy to expose native D code to MiniD apps (and probably
> also functionality to make it easier to deal with MiniD code from the native
> app).  A simple example of the binding looks a bit like this:
>
> WrapModule!
> (
>     "foo",
>     WrapFunc!(one),
>     WrapFunc!(two),
>     WrapFunc!(three)
> );
>
> This will create and register a MiniD module with three functions inside it.
> This module can then be imported and used from MiniD code with no issue.
> The binding layer transparently translates between the native D types and
> the MiniD types; no special considerations (other than the use of
> convertible types for parameters and return values) have to be taken when
> writing the native code.
>
> Of course this is easy but not necessarily the most performant.  It's great
> for quickly exposing functionality that wasn't designed for MiniD to your
> scripts, but if you want the best performance, you can still write native
> functions that are made to work with the language runtime.  The API is
> really starting to come into its own, and virtually anything you can do in
> MiniD code, you can do in native code.
>
> Now that MiniD is Tango-based, I had another idea: use the Fiber class to
> allow native coroutines.  Until now, coroutines had to be script functions,
> as there's no way normally to suspend the execution of a native function.
> I've been playing around with Fiber, and I think it'll make native
> coroutines very doable.
>
> In any case, once the binding library is done, and with a bit of testing, I
> think I'll be able to call this 1.0!
>
> Oh, I suppose you all would like some links ;)  The main page is at
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/minid.  The forums are
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=94, where many announcements
> are posted (and if you want to start some discussion, go right ahead).
> Lastly I recently opened an IRC channel on freenode; it's called #d.minid.
>
> MiniD compiles with DMD 1.0 on Windows and Linux, and depends on the latest
> snapshot of Tango (not the latest stable release, the very
> bleeding-edging-est latest).  GDC is too old to compile it, so sorry Mac
> users.
>
>