Vision/2017H2

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This document discusses the high-level vision for D with semestrial granularity. It is released in January and July of each year.

Note: This document focuses on goals the D leadership works on, explicitly fosters, or strongly believes are important for the success of the D language. Other contributions are always welcome and do not need to be necessarily aligned with this document.

H1 2017 Review

The D Language Foundation

DConf 2017 organized with help from Sociomantic has been a success. The number of attendees (over 100) has been flat compared to DConf 2016.

Expenses for H1 2017 have averaged at $5600 per month. These include recurring expenses (scholarships, contract payments) as well as one-time items (legal, accounting, travel reimbursements for DConf 2017).

The conference registration proceeds, training engagements, and donations have maintained our financial health.

The scholarship recipients have created 57 pull requests. Each delivered a status report on their respective projects at DConf 2017.

Organization

Operation has been smooth with the help of Martin Nowak, Vladimir Panteleev, and Sebastian Wilzbach.

Mike Parker accepted increasing formal responsibilities in public relations and DIP management.

Participation

H1 2017 has been flat in total pull requests compared to to H1 2016: 1698 vs. 1702. Of these, 178 are open indicating that reviews are a bottleneck of increasing the PR traffic.

We have added merge rights to three contributors and are looking for more.

The new DIP process is enjoying good success so far with two accepted, one postponed, and two rejected.

Peak 28-day moving average of dmd downloads from the main site has been 1793.14 downloads/day on 2017-04-19. This is lower than our absolute record (2197.39 on 2016-11-18 attributed to Andrei's visit in China) but it is the second all-time best and a 17% increase over the best in H1 2016 (1527.07 2016-05-01).

Safety and Memory Management

Work on safe containers has made significant progress and has prompted improvements to allocators that are still ongoing.

There has been progress but not sufficient to deem the matter addressed.

H2 2017 Priorities

Technical

• Finish -betterC
• dub fixes+improvements
• add core.aa (https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1282)
• safe RC/Unique/WeakRef implementations (core.rc)
• better error messages for template constraints (C++ concepts)
• transition website docs to dpl-docs/ddox
• partial and parallel recompilation (fix issues with scalable build methods, e.g. template instance emission)
• more lazy semantics

Non-Technical

• Make it easier for people to contribute (aka remove entry barriers)
  • add more tooling to help with initial problems (e.g. DLang-Bot)
  • improve contributor documentation and getting started (should be done by people who haven't seen the DMD/Phobos setup & codebase)
  • encourage the "a fix is only a PR away" mentality (e.g. by means of blog post(s))
  • reduce barrier of entry for potential contributors (e.g. bugzilla/forums registration)

• Increase motivation of existing contributors
  • avoid PRs being stalled in the review queue
  • increase interaction/communication between contributors. NG, mailing list, IRC, Slack
  • make it easy for contributors to adopt a small-scale project (e.g. approved functions to Phobos, ...)
  • promote the beginner/bootcamp Bugzilla tags (they are currently hard to find)
  • publish blog post(s) about a "success story" such as this one
  • foster a positive, constructive, and professional environment