On Wednesday, 2 March 2016 at 06:44:24 UTC, Abhishek Kumar wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 March 2016 at 11:50:02 UTC, Abhishek Kumar wrote:
Hello
I am Abhishek Kumar,computer science student from India.I am
interested in working on D language during GSoC 2016.I found
"GDC Project - The GNU D Compiler" interesting.
I have interest in programming languages and compilers.I have
been working on a Python to C++ code converter,also I am
writing a Javascript parser for code minification in
Scala(Using scala fastparse). I have prior open source
experience in Scala and good knowledge of C/C++.
Can someone help me with how to start and get familiar with
D?
I'll be glad to have your help and suggestions.
Thanks
Abhishek Kumar
Hello
Thanks for your help.I am reading D and hope I'll get familiar
shortly.Can you give me some
beginner friendly task to get acquainted with the D compiler?
Thanks
Abhishek Kumar
Hi
First I would suggest getting familiar with the langauge. Ali's
book is a great starting point:
http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html
Next would suggest git cloning and building the source code the
get some familiarity with the development process and then
reading the open or closed (merged) pull requests to get an idea
what is currently worked on.
The source code is here:
https://github.com/D-Programming-GDC/GDC
Also if your not familiar with git and github, these articles
maybe helpful:
http://readwrite.com/2013/09/30/understanding-github-a-journey-for-beginners-part-1
https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/
=================
Some background information
A D implementation generally consists of 3 to 5 parts:
1) compiler - reads source files and generates object files.
2) Linker - D is compatible with the platform liknker (ld.bfd,
ld.gold, lld, MSVC) however on Windows we also distribute the
OptLink linker (which part of an older compiler project named
DMC) for linking 32-bit OMF object files.
3) DRuntime - library that implements the language featutes that
require run-time support and overall provides platform
abstraction. This what you need to port when you want to expand
the D support to another platform. (e.g. ARM/iOS, ARM/Android,
PPC, etc.) See here for more info:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime
4) Phobos - the D standard library. Builds on top DRuntime to
provide high-level features for the users of the language. See
http://dlang.org/phobos/ and
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/ for more info.
5) Dub - the D package manager and build system. Initially
developed independently, but recently gained enough popularity to
be regarded as part of the D ecosystem. See
http://code.dlang.org/getting_started and
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dub.
3), 4) and 5) are written completely in D. 1) was initially C++
only, but now DMD's frontend is translated in D.
For 2) we rely on the developer's platform, but we still
distribute OptLink on Windows for legacy reasons.
1), 3) and 4) are currently bundled together, and in the future
the installation package will also include 5).
There are 3 major D compilers currently - DMD, GDC and LDC. They
all share the same frontend, which is responsible for lexing
(converting source files into a stream of tokens), parsing
(creating AST from the token stream) and semantic analysis
(verfying the correctness of AST, template instantiation,
overload resolution, compile-time function evaluation (CTFE), ...
all the language rules are here).
GDC uses the GCC backend and LDC uses the LLVM backend.
Initially there was only DMD, which was developed by the creator
of the language (Walter Bright) and so it is currently the
reference implementation. DMD is based Walter Bright's older DMC
C/C++ compiler and currently DMC and DMD share the same backend.
It provides fast compilation times and ok code generation.
GDC and LDC on the other hand have slighly slower compilation
time, however they produce much faster machine code than DMD.
As DMD is the reference implementation, it uses the newest
version of the frontend and GDC and LDC are lagging behind.
I think that the most important thing that you can help with is
giving Iain Buclaw (the main maintainer of GDC) a hand in porting
GDC to the newest frontend version. Currently GDC is at version
2.067 while DMD uses 2.070. This is very important because it
would allow users of GDC to uses newer features of language or
the standard library that are currently only available on DMD.
And it would also make possible the use of newer D libraries on
other platforms that DMD doesn't support.
