I had a severe case of user error going into our January meeting. I had previously disabled audio input in OBS Studio for a project I was working on. I then forgot to enable it when I recorded the meeting. The text chat in Jitsi Meet, which I always make a point to keep open when recording, provides some clues to what was discussed, so do my sporadic remarks (mic input was enabled). Mathias and Max helped fill in some gaps.
I don't believe I've missed anything big. It was a routine meeting with no major decisions handled. But if any of the other participants have more to add, they can reply in the thread.
The Meeting
The meeting took place on January 7, 2021, at 15:00 UTC and lasted a little over 1.5 hours. This was a quarterly meeting, so representatives from industry were present. The following people attended:
D Language Foundation
Andrei Alexandrescu
Walter Bright
Ali Çehreli
Max Haughton
Átila Neves
Razvan Nitu
Mike Parker
Industry Reps & Contributors
Iain Buclaw for GDC
Mario Kröplin for Funkwerk
Mathias Lang for ZeroOne (formerly known as BPFKorea)
Adam D. Ruppe as a Contributor
Robert Schadek for Symmetry Investments
Joseph Rushton Wakeling for Frequenz
Mario
Mario had no issues to report.
Joe
Joe had no issues to report.
Robert
Robert brought up a specific issue with Nullable
:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22619
This led to a discussion of other Nullable
issues. Mario said that Funkwerk once had their own Optional
but moved back to Nullable
a few years ago. Robert volunteered to take on oversight of getting Nullable
to work like it should. He agreed to write up a document outlining the issues preventing it from working as it should. I'll follow up with him on that later.
As for the issue, Martin Kinkelin submitted a fix for it a few days after the meeting and Razvan merged it:
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/8358
Mathias
Mathias would very much like to see the unification of delegates and function pointers. There was general agreement that this is a good goal to aim for. Mathias subsequently informed me he will look into it once some other things are off his TODO list if no one else gets to it first.
He also noted that compiler releases are getting slower. We decided to add this topic to the agenda of a future meeting that includes Martin Nowak and Martin Kinkelin. Iain has subsequently spoken with Martin Nowak, who says that things will pick up again in the near future. Still, this is one of many points in our ecosystem that are 100% reliant upon one person, so it's something that should be discussed in our plans for multiple admins available for multiple services.
Iain
Iain gave us a summary of the work he's been doing on GDC since the last quarterly meeting. He raised an issue with cross compiling from Arm to x86 that relates to D's 80-bit reals. Iain can correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the issue is that Arm doesn't support 80-bit reals, so the frontend needs an emulator to correctly handle compile-time operations (CTFE, const folding) when cross compiling for x86. This is something Walter will have to think about.
Adam
Adam was unable to fully participate due to an issue with his microphone. He did leave comments in the text chat, and he noted that he was fine this time as an observer. We'll invite him to future meetings when his mic is working.
Razvan & Max & Átila & Ali
These guys had no issues to raise, though Razvan did ask Walter to look at this issue:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13162
Me
I brought up an alias this
issue that had come up in a discussion on the community Discord server:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5380
I advocated for the approach in the closed PR that Razvan submitted a fix as a few years ago:
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8815
In the discussion that ensued, the bigger problem with alias this
is that fixing any issues with it will likely cause significant breakage. Andrei suggested that what we really need to do is go back to the drawing board with a DIP for a new feature that replaces and fixes the issues with alias this
. We left it at that for now.
Andrei
Andrei brought up std.v2, but this is where memory fails me. What I do recall is that there was a bit of talk about the std.v2 namespace and how it will live alongside std, and this came up because Robert isn't convinced the planned approach is the right way to go about it. If Andrei or anyone else would like to say more about what was discussed, please post something below.
Walter
Walter talked about the new -vasm
switch, the disassembler he's added to DMD, and how he has already found it beneficial in his work. He noted the PR had not yet been merged, so Razvan took care of it.
Next Month
The next meeting is a regular monthly meeting and should take place on February 4 at 15:00 UTC. I don't know yet what the agenda will be. We have a few items for which I'm awaiting news from others (the modified governance proposal, merging the DRuntime & DMD repositories, the initiative to bring all of the ecosystem services under the DLF with multiple admins, etc.). However, if you have an issue you'd like to the foundation to discuss and are willing to bring it to a monthly meeting, please let me know. We want to bring in to these meetings as many contributors as we can. Even with a major item on the agenda, there's room for one or two contributors to come in with their issues.