I've published my backup script (and named it Bacap, which is how it sounds when you pronounce "backup" in Spanish ;), as it suddenly became used by somebody else and received some patches =)

It has a simple home page for those wanting to see what is it about. I won't be doing formal releases thought, since is such a simple script, that would be overkill (just be thankful it has a git repo and a home page ;).

Wow! Google's Go (remember there is another Go) programming language front-end for GCC has been accepted for merging into GCC 4.5.

Just when there was some discussion (started by Jerry Quinn [*]) in D on how the DMD front-end could be pushed to be merged in GCC too, but DigitalMars (Walter) doesn't want to give away the copyright of his front-end (they are exploring some alternative options though). Maybe the inclusion of Google's Go makes Walter think harder for a solution to the legal problems :).

After some discussion [*] in the D newsgroup about the value of having release candidates for DMD (due to the high number of regressions introduced in new versions mostly), Walter agreed to make public what he called beta versions of the compiler, which he sent privately to people who asked for them (like some Tango developers).

The new DMD betas are announced in a special mailing list (available through Gmane too). It seems like Walter want to keep the beta releases with some kind of secrecy, or only for people really interested on them (the zip files are even password protected! But the password is announced in a public mailing list, that doesn't make much sense =/). I think he should encourage people to try them as much as possible instead, but one step at the time, at least now people have a way to test the compiler before it's released.

I can say without fear that the experience has been very successful already, even when there is no DMD release yet that came from a beta pre-release, you can see in the beta mailing list that multiple regressions have been discovered and fixed because this new beta releases. I think the reliability of the compiler has been increased already. Is really interesting to see how the quality of a product increases proportionally to the level of openness and the numbers of eyes doing peer review.

The new DMD release should be published very soon, as all the regressions seems to be fixed now and big projects like Tango, GtkD and QTD compiles (a lot of focus on fixing bugs that prevented the later to compile has been put into this release, specially from Rainer Schuetze, who submitted a lot of patches).

So kudos for a new era in D, I think this is another big milestone for having a reliable compiler.

I'll just copy what the home page:

bpython is a fancy interface to the Python interpreter for Unix-like operating systems (I hear it works fine on OS X). It is released under the MIT License. It has the following features:

• In-line syntax highlighting.
• Readline-like autocomplete with suggestions displayed as you type.
• Expected parameter list for any Python function.
• "Rewind" function to pop the last line of code from memory and re-evaluate.
• Send the code you've entered off to a pastebin.
• Save the code you've entered to a file.
• Auto-indentation.

I guess everybody (at least everybody with some interest in system programming languages) should know by now about the existence of Go, the new system programming language released yesterday by Google.

I think this has a huge impact in D, because it's trying to fill the same hole: a modern high-performance language that doesn't suck (hello C++!). They have a common goal too: be practical for business (they are designed to get things done and easy of implementation). But there are still very big differences about both languages. Here is a small summary (from my subjective point of view after reading some of the Go documentation):

I really like the simplicity of Go, but I have my doubts about how limiting it could be in practice (it doesn't even have exceptions!). I have to try it to see if I will really miss the features of more complex programming languages (like templates / generics, exceptions, inheritance, etc.), or if it will just work.

I have the feeling that things will just work, and things missing in Go will not be a problem when doing actual work. Maybe it's because I had a very similar feeling about Python (indentation matters? Having to pass self explicitly to methods? No ++? No assignment in if, while, etc.? I hated all this things at first, but after understanding the rationale and using then in real work, it works great!). Or maybe is because there are is extremely capable people behind it, like Ken Thomson and Rob Pike (that's why you can see all sort of references to Plan 9 in Go :), people that knows about designing operating systems and languages, a good combination for designing a system programming language ;)

You never know with this things, Go could die in the dark or become a very popular programming language, only time will tell (but since Google is behind it, I guess the later is more likely).

After 5 or 6 DMD versions with important regressions, LDC has just been updated to DMD's frontend 1.051. This brings a lot of bug fixes to the LDC world (DStress results are looking good! ;).

Lots of thanks to LDC guy for merging the new frontend =)

Subdownloader es otro gran invento para la gente que mirá TV en la compu. Como el nombre lo indica, este simpático programa facilita la tarea de bajar (y subir!) subtítulos utilizando un server que tenga una API compatible con opensubtitles.org.

Particularmente útil es que los subtítulos los busca calculando un hash del archivo, así que se pueden olvidar de los problemas de bajar un subtítulo para una versión que no corresponda.

Just in case you're not that well informed, Chris Lattner has just announced the release of LLVM 2.6. Enjoy!

This is the abstract of the paper describing KLEE, a new LLVM sub-project announced with the upcoming 2.6 release:

We present a new symbolic execution tool, KLEE, capable of automatically generating tests that achieve high coverage on a diverse set of complex and environmentally-intensive programs. We used KLEE to thoroughly check all 89 stand-alone programs in the GNU COREUTILS utility suite, which form the core user-level environment installed on millions of Unix systems, and arguably are the single most heavily tested set of open-source programs in existence. KLEE-generated tests achieve high line coverage — on average over 90% per tool (median: over 94%) — and significantly beat the coverage of the developers' own hand-written test suites. When we did the same for 75 equivalent tools in the BUSYBOX embedded system suite, results were even better, including 100% coverage on 31 of them. We also used KLEE as a bug finding tool, applying it to 452 applications (over 430K total lines of code), where it found 56 serious bugs, including three in COREUTILS that had been missed for over 15 years. Finally, we used KLEE to cross-check purportedly identical BUSYBOX and COREUTILS utilities, finding functional correctness errors and a myriad of inconsistencies.

I have to try this...

Tired of the clumsy Bugzilla web interface? Meet pybugz, a command line interface for Bugzilla.

An example workflow from the README file:

$ bugz search "version bump" --assigned liquidx@gentoo.org

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Searching for "version bump" ordered by "number"
 101968 liquidx net-im/msnlib version bump
 125468 liquidx version bump for dev-libs/g-wrap-1.9.6
 130608 liquidx app-dicts/stardict version bump: 2.4.7

$ bugz get 101968

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Getting bug 130608 ..
Title : app-dicts/stardict version bump: 2.4.7
Assignee : liquidx@gentoo.org
Reported : 2006-04-20 07:36 PST
Updated : 2006-05-29 23:18:12 PST
Status : NEW
URL : http://stardict.sf.net
Severity : enhancement
Reporter : dushistov@mail.ru
Priority : P2
Comments : 3
Attachments : 1

[ATTACH] [87844] [stardict 2.4.7 ebuild]

[Comment #1] dushistov@----.ru : 2006-04-20 07:36 PST
...

$ bugz attachment 87844

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Getting attachment 87844
 * Saving attachment: "stardict-2.4.7.ebuild"

$ bugz modify 130608 --fixed -c "Thanks for the ebuild. Committed to
portage"

I'm very glad that yesterday DMD had the first releases (DMD 1.050 and DMD 2.035) with a decent revision history. It took some time to Walter Bright to understand how the open source development model works, and I think he still has a lot more to learn, but I have some hope now about the future of D.

Not much time ago, neither Phobos, DMD nor Druntime had revision control. Druntime didn't even exist, making D 1 split in two because of the Phobos vs Tango dichotomy. DMD back-end sources were not available either, and Walter Bright was the only person writing stuff (sometimes not because people didn't want to, but because he was too anal retentive to let them ;). It was almost impossible to make patches back then (your only chance was hacking GDC, which is pretty hard).

Now I can say that DMD, Phobos and Druntime have full source availability (DMD back-end is not free/libre though), almost all the parts of DMD have the sources published under a source control system. The core team has been expanded and even when Walter Bright is still in charge, at least 3 developers are now very committed to D: Andrei Alexandrescu (in charge of Phobos), Sean Kelly (in charge of Druntime) and Don Clugston (squashing DMD bugs at full speed, specially in the back-end). Other people are contributing patches in a regular basis. There were about 72 patches submitted to bugzilla before DMD was distributed with full source (72 patches in ~10 years) , since then, 206 patches were submitted (that is, 206 patches in less than 8 months).

But even with this great improvement, there is much left to do yet (and I'm talking only about the development model). This is a small list of what I think it's necessary to keep moving to a more open development model:

Meet Tucan:

Tucan is a free and open source application designed for automatic management of downloads and uploads at hosting sites like Rapidshare.

About a month ago, the GDC newsgroup started to get some activity when Michael P. and Vincenzo Ampolo started working on updating GCD. Yesterday they announced that they successfully merged the DMD frontend 1.038 and 2.015, and a new repository for GDC. They will be hanging on #d.gdc if you have any questions or want to help out.

So great news for the D ecosystem! Kudos for this two brave men! =)