SAOC 2018 ideas

This is a list of potential project ideas for applicants to the Symmetry Autumn of Code. Projects on this page are simply suggestions, not detailed proposals. It is up to any applicant who chooses one to flesh out the idea to a degree suitable for a project proposal as part of the SAoC application.

HTTP/2 for Vibe.d

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HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol. Among its advantages belong decreased latency due to (e.g. due to compressed HTTP headers or pipelined requests) or server-push from the server which allows the server to send resources to the client before they are requested. Therefore, Vibe.d - D's flagship web application framework - would vastly profit from implementing HTTP/2.

Graphics library for resource constrained embedded systems

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Create a 2D rasterizer, rich drawing primitives, and 2D graphics library suitable for resource constrained embedded systems (e.g. ARM Cortex-M) to be used in industrial controls, home appliances, medical devices, consumer electronics, and IoT just to name a few. The end goal would be something similar to Segger's emWin. The library would be used to drive LDCs similar to https://www.adafruit.com/product/3396 Requirements:

• Hardware agnostic; should simply render to a frame buffer
• No dependencies (No Phobos, no C standard library, and no official D runtime).
• Consider using -betterC, but a custom minimal D runtime is also a viable option

Related work:

• https://github.com/TurkeyMan/color
• https://bitbucket.org/timosi/minlibd
• https://github.com/JinShil/stm32f42_discovery_demo

DUB: D's package manager

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DUB - D's package manager - is one of the central infrastructure tools in the D world as a convenient build and package management tool for the D community. With D gaining more and more popularity, it's also a key tool to guarantee D's further adoption. Thus there are many great ideas to improve DUB:

• separate compilation and caching
• extensibility through DUB
• control flow directives
• build system support for C/C++
• git support
• support dub install for distributions
• support building a {snap, Debian, Arch, ...} package out of DUB package

Multi IDE debugger support (for windows)

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Mago, the debug engine used in VisualD, includes a tool called Mago-MI, which has a GDB compatible interface. Therefore, you can use Mago-MI on Windows as replacement for GDB. Several IDEs uses this feature to enable debugging with 1 code line for Windows/Linux/MacOS. It is used in an experimental state in IntelliJ. There is also support in Visual Studio Code and in DLangIDE for which it was originally built.

There are several issues which could be addressed in Symmetry Autumn of Code:

• Mago-MI is written in C++. This makes bug fixing hard. Rewriting it in D might make sense.

• While the installation of Mago-MI is easy if you want to debug OMF executables, it is very hard if you want to debug COFF executables. You need another executable from Mago, you have to register DLLs via regserv and you have to manually create a registry entry. An installation procedure for installing Mago-MI would be great.

• There are some bugs in Mago-MI and DMD (wrong debug information) which makes debugging hard (see this issue and this one). Also Mago-Mi is missing some features. There are more bugs but not investigated so far.

• As Visual Studio Code is already supported by the D Language Foundation, using this as a reference client of Mago-MI would make sense.

While this proposal seems only related to Windows, the nature of Mago-Mi is to enable IDEs having 1 code line for debugging on Windows/Linux/MacOS. Therefore, overall investment in this project is good for all platforms.

Convert DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos Makefiles to D

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Building DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos on Windows is too cumbersome. It appears to require the user to first set up a Posix environment and then battle environment configuration and other vague dependencies such as whether you are building for 32-bit or 64-bit and whether Visual Studio is installed.

Sometimes there are bugs that only manifest themselves on Windows, so they need to be investigated in a Windows environment. To do that that we need to be able to build and troubleshoot dlang repositories on Windows without hassle.

It would be nice if the requirement for a Posix environment was removed by porting all Makefiles to D, so the same code (with appropriate versioning of course) could be used to compile and build dlang repositories on all platforms without a lot of environment setup and configuration. All that would be required would be a recent D compiler in one's PATH and D's intrinsic dependencies (e.g. a C standard library).

Work on this has already been started at https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8293. It just needs to be taken to completion and duplicated to other dlang repositories (e.g. DRuntime and Phobos).