First, let me apologize for not posting an update last week – I had a busy time, but regardless I will try to let you know about the state of affairs regularly in the future. Now, what were I working on? I updated my project page based on the timeline previously discussed at my project mailing list, and – besides me being a day late, more below – it is still valid. These were the main points I worked on:

• Build system integration: The D library is now integrated with the Thrift Autoconf/Automake build system. If a working D2 compiler is detected, the libthriftd static library containing all the modules is now built on issuing make along with the rest of Thrift. make check runs the unit tests for each D module and builds the standalone test executables (i.e. ThriftTest for now).

• Socket transport enhancements: Implemented interrupt() for the server socket which can be used to notify a server waiting on a blocking socket for connections about shutdown, added socket timeouts, properly handle exceptions thrown by std.socket, …

• Added a D implementation of TMemoryBuffer, which is widely internally used and a nice tool for writing unit tests as well. Implemented the Framed transport in D.

• Implemented TFileReaderTransport and TFileWriterTransport, the D equivalent to the C++ TFileTransport. I separated the two components because I could not really think of a situation in which you would use both at once, and conflating the two would complicate the state space (I am not even sure if the C++ implementation does what it is supposed to if read/write calls are interleaved) and make the implementation unnecessarily complex. The TFileWriterTransport implementation performs the actual file I/O in a separate worker thread, which communicates with the main thread using a message passing approach (leveraging D’s std.concurrency module).

• A simple HTTP client/server transport, closely modeled after the C++ implementation.

• An SSL client/server socket implementation using the OpenSSL library, which is linked in dynamically (primarily for easy Windows compatibility). The actual implementation is pretty much a direct port of the C++ TSSLSocket, but I had to quickly write the D2 bindings for OpenSSL first. For now, the bindings live in thrift.util.openssl, as I only included the subset of functions I needed for Thrift, but I might move them out in the future.

As always, you can find the changes on my GitHub fork. I also spent a sizable chunk of my time on contributing some improvements and fixed to the D compiler and standard library projects. As for the issues I mentioned two weeks ago, kudos to Don Clugston for promptly fixing CTFE issues 6077 and 6078, and my DMD pull request 77 and Phobos pull request 65 were also merged in the meantime.

During the last two weeks, I worked on Phobos pull requests 73 (adds std.socket.socketpair), 87 (better std.file error messages), 90 (fixes a mailbox handling bug in std.concurrency – took me quite some time to track down as it caused sporadic deadlocks in my unit tests), 99 (adds timeout handling and hostname lookup to std.socket – I still don’t know why WinSock adds 500 ms to the recv() timeout), druntime pull request 28 (adds a Posix netdb.h module) and DMD pull request 118 (finally removes the _DH flag).

Furthermore, I collaborated with Daniel Murphy on fixing the long-standing issue that function pointers are not properly typechecked, resulting in DMD pull request 96 and [druntime pull request 26] (https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/26). I have also started to work the dreaded DMD bug 314. While the basic fix is in place – that’s how I found the bug in Phobos pull request 102 – (I adapted the D1/LDC changes by Christian Kamm to D2/DMD), I still need to add some more tests and solve a few more complex cases. Unfortunately, I also hit two new issues which I have not been able to fix yet: 6108, a DMD contract inheritance bug, and 6135, a druntime OSX threading/GC crash.