Hello everyone,

Next week I'm going to have a talk on D at an open source conference in Zagrab [1].
This is a great opportunity to advertise D so I'm going to talk about D's strength's. However, the talk is only 30 minutes in length and there's a lot of things I could potentially touch on - templates, dynamic arrays, safety, C interoperability etc. What do you think that I should focus my talk on? Any suggestions or cool D snippets are welcome.

Regards,
RazvanN

[1] https://www.dorscluc.org/

On Friday, 10 May 2024 at 08:43:14 UTC, RazvanN wrote:

A product sells more when you talk about it's impact or benefits to potential customer. We've been talking about the list of features, which we have more than any of the other languages making headlines, but that alone isn't a strong enough call to action.

I personally would be more convinced by projects in D rather than JUST a list of features. Gtkd, vibe.d, severino, dub, dlib, dplug, bindbc-*, mir libraries, and the like. These are direct results of what D can and is capable of doing. Also projects that are as a result of D's interoperability with other languages.

Selling D by the list of features and not by it's impact IMO isn't a good enough strategy.

On Friday, 10 May 2024 at 08:43:14 UTC, RazvanN wrote:

I have some cool features which is quite hard to see in other languages:

    module hip.systems.input;
        import hip.jni.jni;
        import hip.jni.helper.jnicall;

        ///Setups an Android Package for HipremeEngine
        alias HipAndroidInput = javaGetPackage!("com.hipremeengine.app.HipInput");
        alias HipAndroidRenderer = javaGetPackage!("com.hipremeengine.app.Hip_GLES30_Renderer");

        @JavaFunc!(HipAndroidInput) void onMotionEventActionMove(int pointerId, float x, float y)
    	{
            HipEventQueue.post(0, HipEventQueue.EventType.touchMove, HipEventQueue.Touch(cast(ushort)pointerId, x,y));
    	}

        @JavaFunc!(HipAndroidInput) void onMotionEventActionPointerDown(int pointerId, float x, float y)
    	{
            HipEventQueue.post(0, HipEventQueue.EventType.touchDown, HipEventQueue.Touch(cast(ushort)pointerId, x,y));
    	}

mixin javaGenerateModuleMethodsForPackage!(HipAndroidInput, hip.systems.input);

This code exposes functions on Java/Android, they iterate the current module, looking for @JavaFunc (I could have written ExternJava). They will generate based on the java package:

    // file com/hipremeengine/app/HipInput.java
    public static class HipInput
    {
        public static native void onMotionEventActionMove(int pointerId, float x, float y);
        public static native void onMotionEventActionPointerDown(int pointerId, float x, float y);

}

Not only that, but you can also pretty easily call Java functions from D:

        alias HipAndroid = javaGetPackage!("com.hipremeengine.app.HipremeEngine");
        int[2] wsize = HipAndroid.javaCall!(int[2], "getWindowSize");
        AAssetManager* aaMgr = cast(AAssetManager*)HipAndroid.javaCall!(Object, "getAssetManager");

Beyond that, I have also written code that auto translates to Lua and Objective-C. So D is quite flexible into that.

The main 2 packages I know from dub that does that are:

1. arsd.jni
2. objc_meta

On Friday, 10 May 2024 at 13:23:01 UTC, aberba wrote:

You could start by demonstrating a C interpreter, (which under the hood is a
alias cint="dmd -run", which you don't reveal yet).
Then surprise the audience with associative arrays, working out of the box, and perhaps CTFE working on a file.
Explain then that you are still in the same "interpreter" but in a slightly better language (D).
Give more demonstrations of Ds features then reveal that the interpreter is in fact a very fast compiler.
Perhaps then present the EBay table processing code for a commercial application using CTFE.

On Friday, 10 May 2024 at 08:43:14 UTC, RazvanN wrote:

explaining this code

template toggle(bool defualt=false,alias discriminator=void, int i=__LINE__){
	static bool __toggle=defualt;
	bool toggle(bool input){
		if(input){
			__toggle= ! __toggle;
		}
		return __toggle;
	}
	bool toggle(){
		return __toggle;
	}
}