Friday, May 21, 2010

2nd to Last Status Update...

Hey All,

I'm in the real world now, where there is less time for just "what the heck why not" projects, I need to work with my time a lot more strategically now.

I've taken up Taekwando and Hapkido, heavily recommend martial arts to anybody.

I'm probably going to start some sort of open source web toolkit thingy soon :p

That's why this is the second to last announcement.

So I'm not doing D or ArcLib anymore, someone else can take over the project.

I guess I could give some simple advice to the D folks while I'm at it :p
A) Don't make the language a kitchen sink, purge ALL duplicate features and evolutionary stumps
B) Don't split your very small community
C) Make your language inter-operate with other languages

transmission = 2
transmission--;

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Dreadmoon Linux Andromeda Release

http://dreadmoon.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=3&Itemid=14

http://dreadmoon.com/

"This release is primarily intended to eliminate a major roadblock to the development of games and multimedia applications under Linux that is a consequence of the fact that many of the related software libraries are not available as installable packages."

These many libraries are the D libraries and programs required to have a build system on Linux. Tools are in developmental phase.

All ideas are welcome. Email clay dot smith dot r at gmail dot com.

Source Code Repository Moving to Github

Dsource.org/projects/arclib will be ArcLib's official "Web Page."
GitHub will be the official source repository.

This move is being done to provide more exposure to ArcLib and make it easier for contributors to contribute (after the git learning curve).

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Post Re-Post on the Blog

Post-Disclaimer Disclaimer: Originally written for the D NG to focus on 2 questions.
1. Does D really want to be popular? Be the "cool" kid?, and
2. What would it take to achieve popularity (The geek view would be the most technically superior language will win, but this is like saying the smartest man has the best chance of becoming president, we see how that works out in the real world ;) )

Disclaimer: Within a finite amount of time, I wrote this quickly, fully explaining the finer details would take a lonnng time ;)

Concise Summary:
D language popularity can increase dramatically if:
* C++ support is improved
* D is ported to .Net
* D is ported to JVM
* Driver-run grassroots marketing campaign (kind of like intelligent spam or context-sensative ads, where the driver is the central machine that tells where to advertise and when and how, etc, and people would post on different sites. The driver machine could be a community member who organizes this campaign on a wiki, and D citizens could carry out the deed.)

Long post:

Maybe this is just stating the obvious, but if popularity is really what D wants then features are not the choke point or problem with D adoption, I see the choke points as

* How well does this language interact with others?
* How stable is this language ?

I think the D language can make great strides by riding piggy back on

* .NET MSIL (Doesn't exist?)
* JVM (Doesn't exist?)
* C++ (D 2.0 implementing this somewhat)
* C (already done)

The fact is that no one wants to re-invent the wheel, I would never have used D if not for the fact that it can ride on C's progress. Similarly, it is very feasible to have D run on top of C++, MSIL, and JVM.

Great progress have been made in both the .NET and Java libraries, and I suspect D or a similar language would do well there.

D wouldn't do as well on .NET as Java perhaps because C# is already halfway decent, but it would increase D adoption anyways.

D on JVM on the other hand, if it's possible then I think it can be a big hit. You can say there are fundamental philosophical differences between JVM and D, but I see it as a way to increase D adoption. Then suggest move to mainline D when speed is a greater concern.

Now, I'm not the one to do this work anytime soon, but perhaps it is a good idea to remind others. I think language adoption comes from

1. How well the language interacts with existing technologies (Only can interact with C and C++ with a lot of effort, no MSIL or Java interaction)
2. How useful the language itself it (D is already incredibly useful)
3. Language stability (Rapid growth is a good start, however without stability its like trying to build a building on a fault-line )
4. Massive marketing machine (D's actually doing decent in this)

Looking at these points it becomes obvious why languages are successful. Interpreted languages have gotten away with not requiring too much compatibility because of their nature, and C# and Java are decent products with a good amount of hype behind them. C had AT&T and was actually useful, and C++ became popular on the sole fact that it extended C.

Now we have D, which talks to C and therefore the next "C".
D can also be the next "C++", "Java", and "C#" if D can have direct access to these languages libraries.

- Clay

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

SVG, Scenegraph, and Arctographer

I'm working on implementing an SVG loader / renderer using ChristianK's resurrected scenegraph extension for rendering. Also, SirAlaran is working on a arc.x.level extension and tilemap editor, take a look here:

http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4775&sid=7d989c8c6604ff0adcff4dbcb602d3f9

and 

http://www.hackerpilot.org/images/game_project/map_editor/screenshot-2009-11-15.jpeg

All in all, things are looking up. 


 

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

ArcLib v.03 GUI-Physics-Refactor release

Dear D community,

I would like to announce the latest release of ArcLib, Arc v.03 GUI-Physics-Refactor release. See http://www.dsource.org/projects/arclib/report/6 for full list of work done on this release.
The greatest changes were made to the structure of the project. Also includes the joystick support, camera, per pixel collision detection, sprite, and 2d lighting system.

See http://dmedia.dprogramming.com/?n=Tutorials.ArcIntro for getting started with D and ArcLib.
The real purpose of this release is that I finally got everything working and cleaned up in the trunk. I had ported the hybrid GUI, but don’t have time to support it because of the massive amount of code and my lack of familiarity with the system. I will also drop scenegraph unless others want me to keep it.

I will now create the stable branch.
- Clay