D Conference 2007 Aftermath

That was amazing! Thanks to Brad and Amazon for hosting!

I had a moment of abject terror during my presentation, when I finished running through my slides 15 minutes into my hour-long block of time. Thankfully, people started asking questions, and the remaining 45 minutes went by in what seemed like no time at all.

My "slides" may be found here. The video of my presentation (and the others!) will be online eventually.

I was asked a couple of times for details about Pyd's design, and its history. Watch this space for more than you ever wanted to know on this topic.

More coverage of the conference can of course be found on Planet D.

So it was StackThreads after all...

It turns out that StackThreads doesn't compile in the latest versions of DMD at all. Very strange. I've passed this information on to Mikola, and hopefully it will be fixed at some point. Some changes were made in Pyd's trunk, which now compiles again.

Some emails have been floating around about the D conference, discussing schedules and logistics. In theory, I have to fill an hour talking about Pyd. The fact that it is now June, which is only two less than August has hit home, and I really need to get to work on what I'm going to say.

My Linux box broke. My best guess is that the power supply died (if it's not that, it's the motherboard). I bought a new one, which should arrive within a week. Mostly I just used the box to keep irssi open, but I had been helping Brad out with DSource with the thing. So that's annoying. On the other hand, my major goal when I built this thing was to spend as little as possible. With that criteria, the three years I got isn't bad.

Getting Moving Again

I'm back!

After putting Pyd away for a couple weeks back in February, I returned to it to find that the latest version of DMD was suddenly unable to compile it. DMD wasn't merely emitting some arcane error message, it was using up the whole CPU while eating more and more RAM, while printing nothing. Yikes.

I had figured that the only things which had changed were DMD's various new features and some of the new stuff I had crammed into Pyd. However, systematically commenting out my new code didn't change anything. Then simhau made a post to the Pyd forum which clarified things. He was running into these problems, too, when he said:

Tested some more, and [if] I set with_st=False it compiles and works.

Hell. StackThreads. I would never have thought of that. I flipped around CeleriD to set with_st to False by default, and things started working much more readily.

The next step is to figure out whether it's StackThreads or Pyd's iteration wrapping code that's causing DMD to freak out. I don't expect this to be hard. If it's StackThreads, I'll have to rely on Mikola to fix it. If it's my code, fixing it should be easy.

Expect me to commit something new to the svn repo in the near future reflecting all of this.

In other news! I have been invited to speak at the D Conference 2007 about Pyd. So that should be fun.