Mike Parker has done a fantastic job with the D blog: I really
like the unique direction he's taken, focusing on D users and
their first-hand experiences. It is what I tried to do with my
interviews that ran in the newsletter, and he's taken it to
another level. Compare other recent compiled languages' blogs
and nobody else is doing this (you could argue they don't need to
because they have more traction, but I suspect they underrate its
importance):
https://blog.rust-lang.org
https://swift.org/blog/
https://blog.golang.org
Looking at their blogs, they mostly consist of release
announcements along with a few longer technical articles, some
examples of the latter:
https://swift.org/blog/whole-module-optimizations/
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html
https://blog.golang.org/constants
We're missing these tech posts on the D blog, these are the few I
found:
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/06/16/find-was-too-damn-slow-so-we-fixed-it/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/09/28/how-to-write-trusted-code-in-d/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/11/07/big-performance-improvement-for-std-regex/
They're all good examples of what we need more of, though the
regex one could stand to be longer (or at least the first of a
series of posts). That long technical article about
std.algorithm.find was the third most-liked post from the blog in
the last year on reddit, which surprised me:
https://www.reddit.com/domain/dlang.org/top/?sort=top&t=year
D is really trying to do things differently in many ways, we need
writers to lay out how. Andrei or someone else familiar with it
should write an article about std.algorithm and how it works and
why it's better. Walter, Kenji, or Daniel should write an
article on why the dmd frontend is so fast, ie all the technical
decisions that make it so.
Dmitry should write a version of his std.regex talk at DConf
2014, laying out why std.regex is so fast while being so compact,
updated for today (he had some great answers along this vein when
I interviewed him last summer, would love to read the longer
version - http://arsdnet.net/this-week-in-d/jun-28.html). Robert
Schadek should write about std.logger and what it took to finally
ship it. Jonathan Davis should write about the massive
std.datetime and some of the key technical decisions that went
into it. These posts could even be repurposed for the docs,
either copy-pasted or linked from there.
I know why this doesn't happen: these articles take more time and
effort than a couple hours answering questions over email. But
for major selling points of D, it needs to be done. Ideally, the
article would be written by the technical author, as they know
the code best, but it doesn't have to be.
As for announcements, it's time to move the newsletter to the
blog, there's no reason to keep them separate.
