At the end of last year, Razvan Nitu moved from his role as a Pull Request and Issue Manager to the new Project Coordinator position. He is defining the role as he goes, but the primary objective is to keep track of the status of projects that our paid staff and core volunteers are working to complete. He checks in with everyone periodically to see what their progress looks like, if there are any problems, if they need any assistance, etc.

In Razvan's new role, he provides me with updates on the projects he's tracking. Once a month, I will post a status update to the forums.

I gave him a little time to settle into the role, so this first update covers December and January. From now on, I'll post updates in the first week of each month covering the month before.

Projects

Editions

Átila Neves got the DIP into a publishable state a while back. However, Timon subsequently raised some interesting points that Átila took some time to consider. The last update Razvan had was that the conversation was ongoing (though it may have been resolved by now). Átila thinks that once he and Timon settle their discussion, the DIP will be ready to submit. At that point, will need to find a champion to implement it.

Phobos v3

Adam Wilson and Jonathan Davis have been porting modules from Phobos v2 to v3, fixing bugs and refactoring as appropriate. Jonathan has been focusing on porting std.meta and std.traits. Razvan understood the former to be complete and the latter was ongoing. Activity was somewhat quiet in December and Jonathan is busy with work. Additionally, they have encountered and fixed several bugs in both the library and the compiler. As such, progress is slow, but moving forward.

New GC

Steven Schveighoffer has been preparing DRuntime for the inclusion of the new GC. By late January, he had gotten to a point where he had begun removing the dependency that GC functions have on TypeInfo. Things appear to be moving along nicely.

Migrating dpldocs to a DLF server

In my summary of the June 2024 monthly meeting, I reported that we had discussed the possibility of moving the contents of dpldocs.info, currently hosted by Adam Ruppe, to a DLF server, and that Adam had been supportive of the move when I reached out to him. This has almost been completed.

Vladimir Panteleev set up a container to host the dpldocs app. I've set up a DNS entry for dpldocs.dlang.org, though the server hasn't yet been configured to point to the app (it's showing a mirror of the dub registry as I write). Once Vladimir has the server configured, Adam will start redirecting requests from dpldocs.info and we can update code.dlang.org.

Bugzilla to GitHub

Most of the active D community is surely aware by now that we finally got the Bugzilla to GitHub migration over the finish line. Thanks to Robert Schadek for making it happen. Razvan said there are still some kinks to straighten out, but we can consider this one complete.

GSoC application

Razvan has been working closely with Teodor Dutu to get our GSoC application in tip-top shape this year. They've been able to gain some insights that we've lacked in the past. Additionally, the GSoC team sent a message to the organizations last year that provided some helpful information. With that, we're hopeful we'll have a better chance this time.

The application is complete and ready for submission. Given numerous issues Razvan and Teodor identified with our project-ideas repository, they've created a repository specifically for GSoC. Now they need to populate it.

Razvan has contacted multiple potential mentors and published a forum post asking for more project ideas. He has a list of a few already, but it couldn't hurt to consider a few more. If you have any suggestions, please reply to his post ASAP. The application deadline is February 11.

DConf '25

Planning for DConf '25 began at the end of November. At the moment, I'm waiting for confirmation that the contract has been signed. We're tentatively back in August this year. I don't expect any issues with the contract signing, but I don't want to announce the dates until it's all locked in. When it is, I'll put out a call for submissions and start working on the homepage. I expect I'll be able to open early-bird registration at the end of this month, early March at the latest.

The DLF YouTube channel

One of my goals for 2025 is to grow our YouTube channel. That's a more effective vehicle for us than the blog. Consistent publishing is one of the fundamentals of growing a YouTube channel. Unfortunately, we don't have enough content to publish consistently at the frequency I would like.

To help with that, I'm stretching out the publication of the DConf '24 videos. I've rushed to get them out in the past. In the end, I almost burned out, we had a lot of views in a short period, and then the views tanked. By stretching them out across the next few months, we can have a steady number of uploads and continuous views.

If you need to refer to any of the talks in the interim, the three livestreams from last year all have proper chapters now so you can more easily find the talk you're interested in. I've updated the homepage so that each talk has a link pointing to the appropriate timecode in the livestream. I'll replace these as I upload each video.

I will continue publishing entries in the Community Conversations series, though I'll be scaling back to every other month. I'll put up the first one of the year on the last Sunday of this month.

I want to get started on uploading a tutorial series, but I just can't make the time for it right now. I'm hoping to publish some community-created content this year. If you're interested in contributing to our YouTube channel, please reach out so we can discuss the details.

Meeting summaries

I'm in the process of catching up on the meeting summaries. I expect to be back on track next month. At that point, I'll post the monthly summaries one month after each meeting, just before the next meeting, and the quarterly summaries before the last week of the month in which the quarterly was held.

Help Wanted

No matter how much we do, there's always more that needs to be done. Whether it's fixing bugs, helping move a project forward, plugging a hole in the ecosystem, or one of the myriad tasks that eat up time, we could always use extra help. If you're willing to contribute a little time now and then to assist with pushing D forward, please reach out to me or Razvan. It is helpful to have a few volunteers "on call", ready to step in to help with a task that matches their abilities and motivations.

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 13:13:34 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

>

[snip]

Thanks as always for these updates.

These status updates might also work as a blog post.

This is useful information. A couple comments:

>

Steven Schveighoffer has been preparing DRuntime for the inclusion of the new GC.

I wasn't aware that we'll be getting a new GC. Was there an announcement?

>

I'm stretching out the publication of the DConf '24 videos. I've rushed to get them out in the past. In the end, I almost burned out, we had a lot of views in a short period, and then the views tanked. By stretching them out across the next few months, we can have a steady number of uploads and continuous views.

I strongly prefer stretching them out - even stretching them out over the whole year. YT is such that stuff disappears in their algorithmic black hole. An even stronger preference would be to post on the blog when they come out, with a short summary of the talk or something and an embedded video, so I don't need to tangle with YT's algorithm. For some reason, even if you subscribe to a channel, new videos won't always show up in your subscriptions feed.

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 14:03:06 UTC, jmh530 wrote:

>

These status updates might also work as a blog post.

I agree.

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 15:39:35 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:

>

This is useful information. A couple comments:

>

Steven Schveighoffer has been preparing DRuntime for the inclusion of the new GC.

I wasn't aware that we'll be getting a new GC. Was there an announcement?

There was a DConf talk about it:

https://dconf.org/2024/index.html#steves

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 16:31:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>

On Mon, Feb 03, 2025 at 04:23:57PM +0000, Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:

>

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 15:39:35 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:

>

This is useful information. A couple comments:

>

Steven Schveighoffer has been preparing DRuntime for the inclusion of the new GC.

I wasn't aware that we'll be getting a new GC. Was there an announcement?

There was a DConf talk about it:

https://dconf.org/2024/index.html#steves

Can someone summarize the gist of it? I can't seem to find any video or transcripts via that link. Don't really have the time to watch an entire video anyway.

The videos are here:
part 1: https://www.youtube.com/live/AzezZhvIyS4?si=JH8vtvIbZigbBdcx&t=7467
part 2: https://www.youtube.com/live/dq7Jhp9cv4w?si=TbOPzVQ2k-sCGuVT&t=8173

TL;DW:

1. We have a lot of improvements possible over the current GC.
2. Get rid of global lock
3. Utilize the system memory in a cache-friendly way
4. Give back memory to the OS more regularly.
5. Lower the cost of using the GC to the point where using malloc isn't really advantageous
6. Concurrent scanning (planned)

FYI, we have a working version of ldc that includes the new GC as an option. There are caveats, but you can try it out: https://github.com/symmetryinvestments/ldc/releases/

To use, pass in --DRT-gcopt=gc:sdc, and if you get hangs, you may want to try --DRT-gcopt=parallel:0, as we currently have some hangs that occur rarely with parallel scanning with multiple threads.

-Steve

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 13:13:34 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

>

At the end of last year, Razvan Nitu moved from his role as a Pull Request and Issue Manager to the new Project Coordinator position. He is defining the role as he goes, but the primary objective is to keep track of the status of projects that our paid staff and core volunteers are working to complete. He checks in with everyone periodically to see what their progress looks like, if there are any problems, if they need any assistance, etc.

[...]

Thank you for the update. Good luck to Razvan with the new role. Who is stepping up to replace him as a pull-request and issue manager?

Also, good luck to the core developments mentioned by Mike.

On Wednesday, 5 February 2025 at 15:35:50 UTC, M. M. wrote:

>

Thank you for the update. Good luck to Razvan with the new role. Who is stepping up to replace him as a pull-request and issue manager?

It's a paid position, so no one unless we can obtain funding for it. Stay tuned.

On Monday, 3 February 2025 at 18:14:59 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

>

The videos are here:
part 1: https://www.youtube.com/live/AzezZhvIyS4?si=JH8vtvIbZigbBdcx&t=7467
part 2: https://www.youtube.com/live/dq7Jhp9cv4w?si=TbOPzVQ2k-sCGuVT&t=8173

TL;DW:

1. We have a lot of improvements possible over the current GC.
2. Get rid of global lock
3. Utilize the system memory in a cache-friendly way
4. Give back memory to the OS more regularly.
5. Lower the cost of using the GC to the point where using malloc isn't really advantageous
6. Concurrent scanning (planned)

FYI, we have a working version of ldc that includes the new GC as an option. There are caveats, but you can try it out: https://github.com/symmetryinvestments/ldc/releases/

To use, pass in --DRT-gcopt=gc:sdc, and if you get hangs, you may want to try --DRT-gcopt=parallel:0, as we currently have some hangs that occur rarely with parallel scanning with multiple threads.

-Steve

NEW GC NEW GC NEW GC! I tried it on an internal service that's been known as a bit of a memory hog.

Not as fast as the current one right now as far as I can see. A memory heavy test workload seems about 2x slower.

But tbh I'll take that because:

Stock LDC based service after a memory hungry operation: 2952MB res
SDC/Symmetry GC after the same operation: 907MB res

That's genuinely amazing to me. Very excited for how this thing will run with a bit more opt.