On Wednesday, 2 November 2022 at 04:42:06 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
## Iain
For the benefit of the industry folks who only join us in the
quarterlies, Iain recapped some of the things he'd covered in
the two previous monthly meetings, such as the move to
Backblaze for downloads.dlang.org and docharchives.dlang.io,
the transition to Cloudflare that gives us the benefit of free
data transfer with Backblaze, and the general tidying up of the
dlang.io namespace.
He then said that Martin Nowak will not be doing any more
releases of the D language. Iain had been going through the
build scripts that we currently have and figuring out what
needs to be done to tailor them to run in GitHub Actions. It
was taking much longer than he had anticipated. In the interim,
he thought he could at least merge master into stable and get
some 2.101.0 alpha builds set up by hand. (He then [announced
the first beta on October
17](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]).)
The release candidate is out now!
https://dlang.org/download.html
We plan to do v2.101.0 release on the 14th November.
Next, he gave us a summary of his experience at the GNU
Cauldron where he attended a meetup of GCC/GDB maintainers. He
reported that there are some really interesting things going on
with GCC internals regarding the direction in which they're
taking the compiler, including several things we're doing
already. For example, they're adding options to automatically
initialize all static variables to 0 or a bitmask. This sort of
thing is good news for him, as he currently has to do all the
memsets by hand in GDC. It's a win if the middle-end can do
this for him. If you're interested in all the GCC internal
changes that Iain was gushing about and how he can benefit from
them in GDC, please ask him :-)
Correction, initialize all *local* variables. This new feature of
GCC was added to increase the security and predictability of a
program by preventing uninitialized memory disclosure and use.
This really shifts the dynamics between front-end (language
implementation) and middle-end (compiler framework), because now,
if GCC fails to zero out all bits in an object, it's no longer a
GDC bug, rather a GCC security issue. :-)
