Deadlock developer blog

Tango conference 2008 - LDC

2009-02-25T11:38:00.000-08:00

The second video I have prepared during the time I wasn't posting is the long awaited LDC presentation.

It's finally here! Probably the most anticipated talk of the first Tango Conference. See what Tomas Lindquist Olsen and Christian Kamm had to say about the exciting LDC project (or as it was called before, LLVMDC).

The new D1 compiler based on the strong fundament of LLVM, the DMD frontend and the Tango runtime is maturing rapidly. We'll take a brief look at LLVM, report on LLVMDC's status and discuss the future of the project.

You can download the slides from:
team0xf.com/conference/LDC.pdf

Enjoy!

Tango conference 2008 - Rolling Dice Testing

2009-02-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

OHai D community! Sorry for not giving any signs of life for so long but new job made me all occupied and I had little time to do anything else. But here I am - back with bunch of goodies.

Get ready for another video from the First Tango Conference. This time it's dr Fawzi Mohamed rocking and rolling the place!

Testing is not something that you that you want to leave to chance... or is it? In this talk it will be shown how to simplify the tedious work of writing test cases by generating randomly lots of instances of a given test, and so write comprehensive test suites with little code. This approach has allowed the quick development of a multidimensional array library.

You can download the slides from:
team0xf.com/conference/rollingDiceTesting.pdf

Enjoy!

Tango conference 2008 - DDL talk

2008-11-18T06:34:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting speeches from the conference. h3 form team0xf told about ddl and his modifications to this great tool. You have to see it.

This video covers dynamic linking in the D programming language. You'll have the unique opportunity to experience a travel through the dark, creepy seven levels of DLL hell. But be not afraid, there's a light at the end of the tunnel! D Dynamic Libraries will save you from damnation and bring a fresh breeze into the stale, static world. Ultimately, you'll be taken for a twist in lively and dynamic Tango at the highest reaches of DDL heaven*
* Batteries and shiny daemons not included.

You can download slides from: team0xf.com/conference/DDL.pdf

Tango conference 2008 - teaching D talk

2008-11-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

New video from the conference. On that speech doctor from our university shared the expiriances related with teaching D.

Rafal Bocian own wording:
" In the summer term I had a lecture (30 hours) about
the D programming language and the Tango library.
Until the 20th of September, around 100 students
passed the examination with a positive result. During my talk, I am going to present my remarks
about the most difficult and the most popular
constructs in the D language , as well as the most
useful features in the Tango library."

Stay tuned for more videos to come!

Tango conference 2008 - team0xf talk video

2008-11-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

Second talk of the second day of the First Tango Conference performed by US - your dear team0xf ;) h3r3tic and I told about team0xf projects and why you should use some of them in your gamedev (and more) projects.

"Get ready for a quick trip through the Team0xf
gamedev directed libraries. See why D can be the
future of the game development - how its flexibility
connected with speed can really make a difference.
We will abuse threads with Dog, render nice pictures
with Hybrid, shock with Nucleus, do magic tricks with
XPose, and make you all say OMG! If that's not
enough to impress you, get ready to witness
presentations of Deadlock and Defend - two
Team0xf games under development - proving that
the gamedev in D is a fact."

You can download the slides from:
team0xf.com/conference/gamedev.pdf

Tango conference 2008 - DReactor talk video

2008-11-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

First talk of the second day of the Tango Conference was about DReactor. It was given by project author Rick Richardson. What should be mentioned lot's of practical code was shown on this presentation. Also this is the first presentation we filmed in the way that you will see everything happening on the projector screen.

Rick's own wording:
"If Ruby and Erlang had a child, that ghastly
abomination might look something like DReactor. It
is an attempt to offer extreme readability and
extensibility while encouraging fault tolerance and
massive scalability.Writing networked applications
is easy. Writing networked applications to support
tens of thousands concurrent users is hard. Rick will
wal k through the var ious methods of
accommodating network traffic using the Tango API.
Then will showcase the advantages of using
DReactor (built on Tango) for those chores."

You can download slides from here.

Tango conference 2008 - DWT talk video

2008-11-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a while but I was really busy last weeks... Not that I have much time now, but I managed to get some time for some editing. So here it is DWT talk by Frank Benoit who concluded the first day of the conference.

Frank's own wording:

"What can you do with DWT, and where will it go?
The DWT project is a port of SWT, JFace and
other parts of the Eclipse Project. The "DWT
Features" talk will focus on the non SWT part, to
show the DWT users the potential of the
advanced stuff contained in DWT. What you
really need to get your stuff done."

You can download the slides from here.

Tango conference 2008 - MiniD talk video

2008-10-06T00:51:00.000-07:00

Next video from the Tango Conference is there for you. This time it's an amazing talk about a very promising scripting language - MiniD by Jarrett Billingsley.

Jarrett's own wording:

` MiniD is what happens when D and Lua get
together and drink too much. It's a small but
powerful scripting language targeted for use with
D. And without Tango, the new implementation
probably wouldn't be possible `

You can download the slides here.
I've also created a vimeo channel with videos from the conference.
Enjoy!

druntime news from "panic! blog"

2008-10-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Alexander Panek wrote an interesting post about the druntime project. The runtime subject was widely disussed on Tango conference 2008 workshops and "Future of Tango" talk by Lars Ivar Igesund, which will be uploaded this month (as the last talk from the conference). I believe you should add Alex' blog to your rss feeds if you would like to be up to date with the druntime news.

Tango conference 2008 - Fibers talk video

2008-10-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded the next video from the conference. The first talk, by Mikola Lysenko, is about Fibers. Slides can be found here as they are not very readable on the record (this should be much better in videos from second and third day of the conference). You can download video from here (needs vimeo account).

In computer science, a fiber is a particularly lightweight thread of execution. Like threads, fibers share address space; where a distinction exists, it is that fibers use co-operative multitasking while threads use pre-emptive multitasking. Threads often depend on the kernel's thread scheduler to preempt a busy thread and resume another thread; fibers yield themselves to run another fiber while executing.

Mikola's own wording:
` Tango's Fibers represent a major step beyond Phobos. From this single primitive, we can build a host of patterns including coroutines, generators and actor model processes -- all of which would be impossible in Phobos. This type of flow-control is invaluable when designing highly-concurrent systems such as video games or web services. This talk will focus on the Fiber API, some applications and Tango's implementation. All levels of experience welcome `

I've decided to upload talks in the order they were presented on the conference. You can find out what the order was from the conference brochure.

There was a response that vimeo has its disadvantages

You can only skip through buffered parts
You need to register to download the video file

I've choosen this page because it offers best quality among video hosting sites. I believe it's not too hard to create an acoount there (3 fields to fill), so the second one should not be a great problem. If you believe youtube, google video or whatever other page would be better - feel free to host it there too - I don't have time to do it myself. If you do so, please leave a comment here and I will create post linking to your youtube-or-such-video.

More videos to come soon. Hope you will enjoy this great talk.

Tango conference 2008 - Compiler and runtime workshop video

2008-10-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

For a start I've uploaded a record of the discussion workshop. It is divided into three parts:

Introduction - Lars explains the rules of the workshop and what the topics are.
Work in groups - three groups are talking on various topics. I was filming them discreetly so you could feel like you were there.
Summary - groups' representatives are presenting their statements on topics and a discussion starts.

If you don't want to use the Vimeo player to watch it, you can download the movie file.
Next videos I upload will be talks from the first day of the conference. They should appear until the end of the week. A page with Workshop Results put all together will be available soon - for now, enjoy the video.

First conference report

2008-09-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

JimPanic, or Alexander Pánek, wrote the first review of the First Tango Conference - Torun 2008. You can find it on his bloggie. He also uploaded some amazing photos on his flickr.

Tango conference 2008 has finished

2008-09-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

Wow that was great three days. Over 40 attendants, 3 days of energizing speeches, great after parties and many many more. I really want to thank all of you who came for all of the great fun - those who didn't should really regret.

All of the conference was recorded, we will publish the recording within 1-2 months tops - they need a bit of editing.

On the Photo you can see all the speakers during the Round-table with all known conference mascot - mudkip. Speakers starting from right: Frank Benoit, Rafal Bocian, Tomasz Stachowiak, Lars Ivar Igesund, Fawzi Mahomed, Tomas Lindquist, Jarrett Billingsley, Mikola Lysenko, Christian Kamm (behind gruby from team0xf playing with room courtine controlls) and me. Rick Richardson sitting on the conference table.

Photo was taken by Rudy, more photos from conference with mudkips can be found in his latest post.

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.035

2008-09-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

Today I uploaded newest phobos backtrace hack. As always you can download it from our download site.

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use them.

Hybrid works with newest dmd again

2008-09-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

As you all probably know Hybrid is team0xf's evil OpenGL-powered GUI, a crossbreed of RMGUIs and IMGUIs under MIT license which works on windows, linux and freebsd. Since dmd 1.032 it was not compiling because of apaged problems with dmd 1.031+.
Thanfully since dmd 1.035 and thanks to h3 efford we are able to use hybrid with newest dmd releases.

Tango conference 2008 program details

2008-09-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

OK! I've just updated program details section of the Tango Conference 2008 page. It should stay in this form unless some nasty "surprise" occurs. We also have more info about the talks:

Rick Richardson will probably talk about DReactor. It is a multiplexing server framework that supports multiple event loops, deferred executions, and ass-kicking speed. It currently builds and runs it's basic test applications and unit tests.

New speakers have been announced:

Lars Ivar Igesund will talk about the future of tango, the topic often chosen in your registration forms.
Fawzi Mohamed will cover the topic "Rolling Dice Testing".

If you thought that something was still wrong with the conference because the exact agenda hadn't been published, you should now have no doubts and start to plan travel. You still can register. Don't loose your chance of being part of this great event!

Tango conference 2008 speakers

2008-08-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago Conference Speakers List was published on the NG. Lets take a closer look at the announcment:

A preliminary list of most of the entries in the program at the Tango
Conference 2008 in Torun, Poland, is now ready. Titles for most of the
talks are not ready yet though, and so the below should not be considered a
definite guide. More posts on the program are also due to be confirmed
later, along with the final time table.

- Tomasz Stachowiak - DDL

DDL is one of those projects in D that proved me how D is amazing. This utility for loading "D Dynamic Libraires" makes DLL or SO to hide in the shadows in shame. It was started by Pragma(Eric Anderton), but now also h3r3tic (Tomasz Stachowiak) added some patches to the project. He will tell all about this project on the conference. Personally I can add, as a colegue of Tom who witnessed many of his speeches, that his lecture will surely be interesting and will explain the topic greatly.

- Frank Benoit - DWT Features
Everyone who at least touched nasty java world knows SWT. It is very mature and quite relable gui library which is also multiplatform. Frank Benoit (aka keinfarbton) once worked on project called tioport which aim was to create tool for converting java code to D. Altought the project is stalled for now, it managed to convert SWT to D. That's how DWT began to exist. Support for it was also added to Entice GUI Designer making it as easy to use as in java with use of eclipse or netbeans. You will find out all about DWT from it's author himself - surelly worth hearing.

- Mikola Lysenko - Get some Fibers in your diet
Mikola Lysenko is surely man of many talents. We could see his amazing work on gamedev. He also has added to Tango extremely cool feature - Fibers. What they are and, what's most important, why/when/how to use them will be subject of this exciting talk. - Rick Richardson
Top Secret for now.
- Tomas Lindquist / Christian Kamm - LLVMDC
Compilers are one of the most important issues of D nowdays. Althought we have two of them, each has it's problems: DMD is well supported by D author himself, its code optimisation (done by dmc) is poor in compare to, for example, gcc. GDC (which is using gcc as a backend) is badly supported (at least in my opinion). Many (including) me are looking forward to LLVMDC which could solve those problems. What is the progress of this project and why are so many waiting for it - you can find answers to this quesitons and many more on this lecture - Jarrett Billingsley - MiniD
There are many scripting languages: lua, squirrel, io, python ... The one you will hear about during this talk is a golden middle between D and a scripting language. Looks really promissing as much for the game development issues as for other aplicaitons.
- Dr Rafał Bocian - On teaching D
As you surely remember I wrote about the fact, that D is being taught on my university. Over 150 students, about 500 pass projects. How this all happened? How students are responding to D? What should one know before starting to teach D? Who to ask if not the first man in the world who was officially holding course of D on a university.
- Kris Bell - Lightweight Coding
Last year on D conference Seattle 2007 Kris Bell was talking how to use slicing to improve application performance. This year he will tell what lightweight coding means and how to use it in your applications.
- Team0xf - Game development panel
- Compiler/runtime workshop
- Keynote

I believe I don't need to explain those.

As I tried to show all of those talks are seriously interesting but also covers wide set of topics, so everyone should be able to satisfy his main interests and expand horizons . More info about the Conference coming soon.

On Travelling to Tango Conference 2008

2008-08-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

OK so many of you are probably looking for different ways of getting to Torun for the Tango Conference 2008. If you will travel by bus or train then you will probably plan your trip easily. If you want to travel by plain first look at airports list on conference pages. When you have chosen the air connection and airport that suits you, you should look at buses and trains connections to find best option for you.
This and many more you can find on the conference main page.

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.034

2008-08-09T01:40:00.000-07:00

This time just after the release of newest dmd I uploaded newest phobos backtrace hack. As always you can download it from our download site.

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use them.

Tango conference 2008

2008-08-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

In assosiation with Tango Team, team0xf is organizing First Tango Conference. The announcement was published on the news group:

Dear D community,

it is our pleasure to announce that the first Tango Conference will take
place in Torun, Poland in September. The dates have been set to 26th to
28th (friday through sunday).

Conference program includes both talks and sessions such as a game
development panel and a concurrency workshop. Although it is a Tango themed
conference, it should be highly interesting for the D community at large. A
couple of the program spots will be decided upon after the first
registrations as that will tell us more about which topics interest you the
most. The complete program will be announced at that point.

There will be a small fee to cover drinks and meals.

More information about the conference can be found from the following link:
http://dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/TangoConference2008

To register for the conference, please go to:
http://dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/TangoConference2008Registration

Tango patched libs for 0.99.7

2008-08-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

There where a new release of tango: 0.99.7 Dominik release. As you probably remember because of peoples request we've start publishing patched libraries for each new stable version of tango. You can find the one for Dominik release on our download page.

Any questions or problems, can be solved by sending me an email, joining #team0xf irc channel on freenode server or by leaving comment here. Please don't ask questions about team0xf backtrace hack on #d.tango.

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use it.

Tango backtrace hack working again

2008-08-01T00:55:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to announce that tango backtrace patcher is working again. Sorry it took so long but I was (and still am) quite sick, and h3r3tic had lots of work to do, but finally we diagnosed the problem. Additionally patcher is optimised to use less memory so we might say it's not only working but also upgraded. You can download it from our download page.

Phobos hack big update

2008-07-26T02:18:00.000-07:00

I finally updated phobos hack section to work with newest dmds. I made apropriate lib files for dmd 1.030, 1.031, 1.032 and the newest 1.033. You can download all of them from our download page. (Note that you need only to download the one that feats your compiler version).

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use them.

dmd0xf - another way

2008-07-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

As you surely remember dmd0xf project was suspended due the official issues. h3r3tic came to an idea of creating simple installer instead that downloads and compiles all what's necessery. You can find it on our download page.

Tango backtrace hack is not working

2008-07-25T05:17:00.002-07:00

Hello folks!
I was quite busy lately - exams and some of vacation and top secret stuff, but now I'm back.
First news I have for you isn't unfortunately cool - for some reason tango backtrace hack isn't working. we are currently trying to diagnose the problem but it may be not that easy. At the moment we even can't tell after which tango revision / dmd update something borked, we will appreciate all the feedback you have on this subject.

Tango backtrace hack another way

2008-05-04T02:26:00.001-07:00

As you all know, Tango backtrace hack was available through our tango patcher. Unfortunately there were some problems with using it, therefor we decided to publish patched tango libs for each release (starting with 0.99.6). You can download tango hacked *.lib files from our download page.

Any questions or problems, can be solved by sending me an email, joining #team0xf irc channel on freenode server or by leaving comment here. Please don't ask questions about team0xf backtrace hack on #d.tango.

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use it.

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.029

2008-04-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

D in Torun (Poland)

2008-04-02T05:04:00.000-07:00

Hello, I was waiting a while to write this post, because I needed to gather all the data.

Since November, team0xf organized D workshops at our university. The attendants were students and staff working at the university. For those of you who know Polish, there are videos and presentations from the workshops on the workshop page.

That was the mid-phase of D expansion at our university - the first step was our project, Deadlock, which made people start asking about D etc. The final phase began this semester. "Programming in D" is now an official course. Despite the fact that it is a "subject of choice", over 100 students subscribed and now are attending lectures and laboratories.

Also, D is considered as an equal language to other languages on other classes, so we are all able to code projects in it like in c++, java or python.

Team0xf is cooperating with a lecturer - dr Rafal Bocian - so the class is up to date. The runtime library used during labs is Tango. Labs are conducted by dr Rafal Bocian and MC Leszek Rybicki, who was most helpful with workshop organization.

GC Benchmark

2008-04-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, there was a GC benchmark done among the programming languages. I did then, Tango version of D candidate for this test. I was asked to check if the benchmark is still up to date. It was. Since I haven't write about it here, I will do now.

Code is simple, and created only for GC examination. Test was made with dmd 1.028, Tango trunk version (revision 3410) and Phobos that comes with 1.028 on my personal IBM T41 laptop. Both compiled with:

build -release -inline -cleanup -O

Tango result:

real 0m14.091s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.020s
real 0m14.000s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.000s
real 0m14.180s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.000s
real 0m13.389s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.010s
real 0m13.410s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.030s

avg: 13.814

Phobos results:

real 0m19.058s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.010s
real 0m20.649s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.000s
real 0m19.378s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.010s
real 0m18.617s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.010s
real 0m18.626s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.000s

avg: 19.266

As you see GC is much faster in Tango than in Phobos.

Code:

class TreeNode {
int item;
TreeNode left, right;

this(int item, TreeNode left=null, TreeNode right=null) {
this.item = item;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}

int check() {
return left is null ? item : item + left.check - right.check;
}
}

TreeNode makeTree(int item, int depth) {
if (depth > 0){
return new TreeNode(item, makeTree(2*item-1, depth-1), makeTree(2*item, depth-1));
} else {
return new TreeNode(item);
}
}

void main(char[][] args) {
const minDepth = 4;
int n = 16;
int maxDepth = (minDepth + 2) > n ? minDepth + 2 : n;

int check = makeTree(0, maxDepth + 1).check;

auto longLivedTree = makeTree(0, maxDepth);

for (int depth = minDepth; depth <= maxDepth; depth += 2){ int iterations = 1 << (maxDepth - depth + minDepth); check = 0; for (int i = 1; i <= iterations; i++) check += (makeTree(i, depth)).check + (makeTree(-i, depth)).check; } }

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.028

2008-03-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

Sorry for keeping you waiting, but real life sometimes can be time consuming too ;) Anyway, I just uploaded newest dmd phobos backtrace hack. As always you can download it from our download site.

If you are new to backtrace hack concept, you can read my article how and why to use them.

D planet

2008-03-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

How many of you know, there is a great page, created by Anders Bergh, combining all off the articles comming from D related blogs. To see it - visit http://planet.dprogramming.com/ .
Idea of planet is very simple: it's combining all the rss from D related blogs to one blog, with RSS, so you can have only one feed to read all cool blogs. If you have D related blog and want your posts to be shown on the planet D, you should use this link , or contact Anders Bergh personally.

D in China

2008-03-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

I was asked by yidabu to mention how greatly D society is growing in China. They have some pages where you can look for help and interesting articles when you know their language:

Title: D语言中国
Description: D Programming Language China
URL: http://www.d-programming-language-china.org/

Title: D语言论坛
URL: http://bbs.d-programming-language-china.org/
Description: Chinese support forum for the D Programming Languae

I've also added them to the links on the right of the page. Great work yidabu!

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.027

2008-02-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

On our download page you can find phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.027 . Sorry for the delay. You can find out how to use backtraces from one of my articles.

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.026

2008-01-27T03:23:00.000-08:00

On our download page you can find phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.026 . Sorry for the delay. You can find out how to use backtraces from one of my articles.

tango and dmd 1.026

2008-01-25T07:33:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago new dmd was released containing many bug fixes. Unfortunately one of those bug fixes breaks tango. For now, tango users must stay with dmd 1.025. The question is will that delay new tango release? More about this you can find on ng.

Mersenne twister

2008-01-22T01:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the permission of Proffesor Makoto Matsumoto, I was able to create this Mersenne twister class. The Mersenne twister is a pseudorandom number generator linked to CR developed in 1997 by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura that is based on a matrix linear recurrence over a finite binary field F2. It provides for fast generation of very high quality pseudorandom numbers, having been designed specifically to rectify many of the flaws found in older algorithms. Mersenne Twister has the following desirable properties:

It was designed to have a period of 2^19937 − 1 (the creators of the algorithm proved this property).
It has a very high order of dimensional equidistribution. This implies that there is negligible serial correlation between successive values in the output sequence.
It passes numerous tests for statistical randomness, including the stringent Diehard tests.
It is fast.

More information you can get from MT mainpage. The module can be find on my page. There are both tango and phobos versions. If you meet any bug, or get any feedback, please email me! The modules are released on Academic Free License ("AFL") v. 3.0.

new team0xf blogger

2008-01-19T04:01:00.000-08:00

Tomasz "h3r3tic" Stachowiak, the leader of team0xf finally set up his own devblog. His first article is about an amazing project called dshade.

Installing Tango Backtrace Hack on Tango Bundles

2008-01-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was wrote that the Tango Backtrace Hack is available from our download page. Due to the patcher (that is a .bat file) included, the installation is pretty simple and quick. Unfortunately not in all cases.
The Tango team some time ago introduced "Bundles and Binaries". We will be playing with the dmd "current release bundled with Tangobos" package, but everything I'm going to describe should be similar on other packages. OK as I said there are some packages, but unfortunately they are far from out of the box philosophy. You will not get a bad impression at the first sight (despite needing to download Rebuild or Build), but when you start doing some real coding, you will find out those packages are lacking some stuff.
Of course the patcher does some serious compiling and is obviously showing the lack of necessary components in tango packages. But have no fear, team0xf is here! ;) So what do you need to add to the package, so that the tango hack will work?
Go to http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/dcompiler.html and download the DMC package. Copy files from dm/include to yourtangobundle/include (you will probably need to create that directory). Also copy dmc.exe and scppn.exe from dm/bin to yourtangobundle/bin.

After that you can run patchTango.bat.
You can test the backtrace hack by running code like:

module Main;

void main(){
assert(false);
}

Compile it with dmd -g Main.d
When running Main.exe you will get:

Tango backtrace hack intiated
Unhandled D exception!
Error: Assertion failure (tango.core.Exception.AssertException) in Main.d [4]
backtrace:
004040ea onAssertError (+2e)
0040201e _Dmain (+e)
004023d1 extern (C) int dmain2.main(int, char**) . void runMain(void*) (+d)
0040e586 mainCRTStartup (+aa)
7c816fd8 ???
00000001 ???

If you don't see the backtrace, that would mean you forgot something ( or there is something I haven't written about ).

I hope this short article will help with patching tango bundles. If there are other problems in applying the tango hack to other packages, please paste a comment here reporting it. We will try to post a similar article, solving your problem.

There are some other files you should get from the orginal dmd/dmc packages. The most important is to add these libraries to yourtangobundle/lib :

gdi32.lib
usergdi32.lib
winmm.lib

Tango backtrace hack

2008-01-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

After sad story of dmd0xf we are publishing the Tango backtrace hack as a separate patch. You can get it from our download site. On the contrary to the phobos hack, for Tango you will get the patcher which will modify your tango copy and add backtrace support to it.

To learn how to use backtraces, you can read this article.

dmd0xf is no more

2008-01-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hello. Unfortunately I must announce that dmd0xf is no more.
I'm still a student and was not aware, and not even caring, of all the law issues related with dmd0xf. We were not aware that it is necessity to have Walter Brights agreement to redistribute dmd. Therefore we must remove dmd0xf for now. I'm planning to reincarnate it as mercury project later on, on some other conditions, for now, dmd0xf is dead!

The good thing is that we introduced the backtrace problem again, and some people started to additionally look into it.

Anyway, sorry for all that.

Development in D with use of backtrace hack

2008-01-16T09:56:00.000-08:00

With every release of dmd since DMD 1.020 team0xf announces release of phobos backtrace hack. Now with dmd0xf we present Tango backtrace hack. But what is it really for? In this short article article I will try to attract you with it and show some examples how useful it is.

First of all, it's for Windows developers. What does it do? When you install the hack in your compiler, and compile your application with -g switch, whenever your Windows program crashes it prints stacktrace. Lets take an example:

void main(){
assert(false,"oups!");
}

We will compile it with rebuild -g -exec Main.d and we here's what we get:

Tango backtrace hack intiated
Unhandled D exception!
Error: oups! (tango.core.Exception.AssertException) in Main.d [2]
backtrace:
0040417a onAssertErrorMsg (+36)
004023e5 extern (C) int dmain2.main(int, char**) . void runMain(void*) (+d)
0040e616 mainCRTStartup (+aa)
7c816fd8 ???
00000001 ???

As we can see an AsssertException was thown. We can read that it came from Main.d [2] so in second line of our code (in file Main.d). As the example is not very complicated, backtrace is short and not very attractive, let's do something more complicated:

module Main;

int div(int a, int b){
assert(b!=0);
return a/b;
}

void foo(){
div(8,3);
div(2,2);
div(7,0);
div(8,2);
}

void main(){
foo();
}

rebuild -g -exec Main.d again, and let's look at our backtrace:

Tango backtrace hack intiated
Unhandled D exception!
Error: Assertion failure (tango.core.Exception.AssertException) in Main.d [4]
backtrace:
0040413e onAssertError (+2e)
00402028 int Main.div(int, int) (+18) Main.d:5
00402059 void Main.foo() (+25) Main.d:12
00402071 _Dmain (+9) Main.d:16
00402425 extern (C) int dmain2.main(int, char**) . void runMain(void*) (+d)
0040e5d6 mainCRTStartup (+aa)
7c816fd8 ???
00000001 ???

OK, so we can now trace full route AssertException went from the place it was thrown. So Main.d [4] here the exception was thrown. Let's see it's route (top to bottom). Main.div(int, int) (+18) Main.d:5 is route start. The number 5 is a bit tricky here, and might be confusing. Of course routes' start is in line 4. When we know that it was Main.div(int, int) which caused our program to break, we can say it was called from void Main.foo() in Main.d:12. Once again real code was in line 11 (see how it works?). foo() was colled from _Dmain in Main.d:16 (and that line has appropriate number).

That's how, more or less, we can trace all exceptions, including assert. This go for all design by contract. We can trace things in unittests also, see what exactly fails in class invariants and so on. But there's some more!

There are common bugs we all make from time to time our hack helps to fights with. Like array index out of bounds:

int[] foo;

void crssh(){
foo[667]=66;
}

void main(){
crssh();
}

By analyzing stacktrace, we can find out that all happens in void Main.crash() Main.d:3 . Also we can trace how it happened. This example is an obvious one, but with hash maps or in more complicated code finding where bug is can become complicated. Next common mistake, specially for newcomers from c++ world:

class Foo { int a=1; }
void main () {
Foo foo;
int i=foo.a;
}

Access Violation is another bug every coder is familiar with. Here the bug is simple, we created reference set to null and trying to access it. _Dmain (+9) Main.d:4 shows us where we are accessing null reference.

Using design by contract (like asserts and unittests) with backtrace hack is the way to make debugging easy and quick. There will be very rare cases when you will need to run actual debbugger.

It might be obvious but I was asked to write it: backtrace will only be shown on uncaught exceptions. If you catch the exception, you dont get the trace.

I hope this short Article made you more familiar with this powerful tool. Of course you can leave without it. You can use debbugers or just analysing code, but analyzing stacktrace is the simplest method there is. What's more having it will never harm you, but surely will help. Happy debugging.

PS
Here I used Tango and tango backtrace hack, of course working with phobos backtrace hack is the same.

dmd0xf

2008-01-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

We are proud to introduce to you our new Creation. dmd0xf is a massive package containing all you need to code in D on windows. All you need to do is unpack this archive and add its bin to your PATH environment variable. Newest release contains:

dmd 1.025
dsss 0.75 , rebuild included; rebuild is suggested when working with Tango.
build v 3.04 - when you use build with this package, you must link dmd-tango-base.lib, for example build yourApp.d dmd-tango-base.lib
Tango 0.99.4 Frank release with Tangobos - Tangobos will let you use most of phobos in your tango projects
Tango backtrace hack for 0.99.4

dmd0xf is available from tango website, as one of the community downloads, and on our download site. We will try to keep it up to date, working and stable.

Tango backtrace hack

2008-01-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tom Stachowiak's work, backtrace hack is ported to Tango now. For now it's only available in the dmd0xf package.

Phobos backtrace hack for dmd 1.025

2008-01-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

Phobos backtrace hack for newest dmd was added lately. The Phobos backtrace hack is the simplest way of getting a stack trace when your Phobos-based, MS Windows program crashes. In order to use it, you must replace the orginal phobos.lib in your dmd/lib folder. Then just compile your code with the -g option.

News

2007-12-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

First of all finally two books about D in English will be published. First is Tangos' Team book: "Learn to Tango with D" will be available in January. Great respect for their authors: Kris Bell, Lars Ivar Igesund, Sean Kelly and Michael Parker. I've already pre-ordered that book, I'm sure it will be great read.
Also Andrei Alexandrescu has announced on his web site http://erdani.org/ that he's working on the book "The D Programming Language" due out in October of 2008. You can see him speaking about D on google video.
Also two new versions of D were released: 1.024 and 2.008 . Of course team0xf released phobos hack for newest 1.x release. You can download it from our page. 2.008 presents new const/invariant idea, what is actively discussed on ng right now.

That would be all for now.
Thanks for visiting my devblog.

More stuffies!

2007-11-12T16:30:00.000-08:00

Last binding left to be released, RakNet 2.5 for D, is now available on our Download Site, also under New BSD licence, so feel free to use them.
Newest Phobos hack, for dmd 1.023, is available there as well.

New stuffies to download

2007-11-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Today, finally, we've uploaded some bindings which were used during Deadlock's development. On the team0xf download page, you can find bindings for:

Cg
Fmod Ex
Ageia PhysX

All are under New BSD licence, so feel free to use them. Also newest Phobos hack is available there as well.

Alive and kicking

2007-10-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

Hello people! I haven't posted for a while. First I was using the advantages of holidays to do absolutely nothing (bad nerd, bad bad nerd!) and now tough times at uni have started. But here I am, bringing you some team0xf news!

As I've promised before holidays, we've published Deadlock's university presentation with English subtitles. You can find it on youtube here: part 1, part 2, part 3. Of course you can find high resolution versions on deadlock.team0xf.com .

Additionally I made a gameplay trailer of Deadlock, as it was presented during that presentation. You can find it on youtube, or download high resolution from our page.

Also in the fallowing days I will try to refactor Necrophilia a bit. Make it more friendly to use for other coders. Yes LeoD also for you! What's more, I believe the project is mature enough to get a real name. (Necrophilia was a joke codename, and I'm a bit sick and tired of the jokes inside team0xf about it :P). So I've decided to name it Lich. Lich is a fantasy monster, powerful undead wizard. I hope my library will be also powerful and magical ;). You can see the new Logo on the left. A new page will be developed soon with tutorials for my library.

Yesterday I started developing MAS, that is 'Mercury Autopatching System'. It will be used to support beta-tests of team0xf projects. It is going to be a system composed of four cooperating components. Mercury Main Server will be the heart of the system. It will detect new versions of the project, coordinate the system and of course host the files. Mercury Mirror Server will be a cooperating software, making it able to create many mirror hosting machines. Mercury Administration Tool will give root or project administrators access to the Mercury Main Server, which is going to be a daemon application, to manage the project, send files, add mirror servers and many more. Mercury Autopacher will be an application added to the project, taking care that betatesters and program users will always have the newest versions of the products. I will write more details while the system developed progresses. After this basic concept is finished, there are some more plans for MAS. The first is inspired by the Blizzard Autopacher. I plan to create something like a little torrent web for every project, where main and mirror servers will be seeders and downloading clients will be leechers. I'm also considering building a Mercury backup system for emergency situations. I don't want to jump to details, so let's say that I would like to make MAS immune to things like server failures or power-downs. Anyway, after testing on team0xf projects, I'm considering letting other people use it.

OK, the last news is more like an interesting fact. As some know, team0xf is making gigantic D propaganda on the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. And it's giving results. Starting this Tuesday, we begin organizing D Workshops. Not only for students, but also for science workers of our university. What's more, the next semester, an official course about programming in D will be organized. We can proudly annouce that Nicolaus Copernicus University is first with that much of D in its education programme.

Stay tuned! Team0xf is alive and kicking!

Tango.Scrapple

2007-08-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

Interesting project is started on dsource. Tango.Scrapple is "a collection of handy Tango based codes and classes that otherwise don't have a home". Sounds interesting!

Evolution in progress

2007-08-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

Hi! Some time ago I was talking about team0xf evolution. Now I'm proud to announce that it's started. First of all, we have a new homepage, team0xf.com. Not much there yet, but it will grow and soon you'll able to find many new goodies there. At the moment, there's the Phobos hack, updated for DMD 1.020. Soon we will release bindings that we've done while working on our projects.
Second big thing to announce: We have two new members! Leonard 'LeoD' Dahlmann and Anders 'Anders' Bergh have joined team0xf. LeoD's project, called 'Defend', has been added to our project list.
As some of you may remember, team0xf.com was once Deadlock's main page. You surely do remember, we changed our game's name to 'Deadlock: The League'. Its page has now been moved to deadlock.team0xf.com, but it's still a bit outdated. We've produced a few new clips, so soon you should have some cool movies to watch. The most important thing about 'Deadlock: The League' is that it lives again. We are refactoring the network, game mechanics and sound subsystems. There are many things to be changed, but we will try to re-open beta-tests as soon as possible.
OK - end of the news snapshot ;) stay tuned for more...

Derelict problems with 1.018

2007-07-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

Watch out. According to linux users there are some problems with programs compiled with dmd 1.018 (programs are crushing) even after aldacrons' update for DMD 1.018. The solution for now is unfortunately using dmd 1.017. It appears that fault lies on dmds' side.

.init discussion

2007-07-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

Starting from dmd 1.017 and 2.001 the .init property for a variable is now based on its type, not its initializer. This decision is a reason of hot discussion starting on the ng. As i wrote before - 1.x shouldn't be touched except for optimizations and bugfixes. Unfortunally this is taking the idead of .init away from us because of what is quite problematic also in the 2.x branch. For more details read the ng - it's deffinitly worth it.

DMD 1.018 and 2.002 releases

2007-07-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

This time Walter gave us gigantic number of bugfixes
More info:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/changelog.html
http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.1.018.zip

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/changelog.html
http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.2.002.zip

D 2.0 reflections

2007-06-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

Heh first of all this week D 2.0 beta was released. yeeeeey. First feature of the 'brand new D' presented is related to const. I don't want to write here what const is and how it will exist in D because there are many good articles about it. Here are my favorites:
while(nan) article, with his Const Wars.
There is of course Walter's article.

For people that dont't follow the NG - Now there are two separate branches of D. 1.x and 2.0 beta. This article is mostly dedicated to stressing the difference.

D 1.x is really the official D (here is a change log). When you are thinking of D as a language - you certainly should think about D 1.x. This is the stable branch, where new releases will only fix bugs, and maybe do some optimizations.

D 2.0 beta is an experimental field for Walter (here is the change log). We should think of it as a place where Walter will present his proposals for D 2.0. For now - consts, later - probably macros. Who knows what more in the future. This should not be considered as D itself.
This branch should only be used to play with the proposals. So don't cry about D changing dynamically again. D 1.x is for big projects and for the public. Don't be scared. D 2.0 beta is for D 2.0 as D 0.x was for D 1.0. Thank Bob this time we have a stable branch so nobody can say that D isn't stable and is changing too fast. Of course I'm not saying that 2.0 beta should be ignored - it just shouldn't be taken for the actual D.

Anyway the difference is quite obvious to me, but caused a bit of chaos in D world.
First of all, the main page http://www.digitalmars.com/d is dedicated to 2.0 beta really. To access the 1.x sub page you must click D1.0 in the menu. So a hasty programmer wanting to know about D after reading the page will surely treat D2.0 beta as the official D. In my opinion, things should be the opposite - main page should be about D 1.0, having written in big letters "hi, here is D, D1.0 you can rely on, D 2.0 is experimental stuff for the far future, if you want to test feature proposals you are welcome to beta test it". That would make it easy to understand the difference.
Second the newsgroup was not divided while the web page was. That's why now we have information about both branches in one place.. Ok for people already in the subject, but NG should be also, or mostly, for the new users to know D better. I think that if D was branched, website was divided, also NG should be separated - to guarantee knowledge to stay clean. Remember that this chaos can scare off new coders - and that would be sad when we have a great stable branch.

Const is an awesome feature and is surely needed in D, specially in bigger projects. Yeah - that's true we were writing Deadlock without it, but many times it would really become handy if available. Nevertheless we will not jump to D 2.0, at least for now. We will wait until it is stable enough and worth jumping to.

I'm longing to see what great features will be introduced in D 2.0 beta. Maybe I will write some small things in it, but bigger projects mean D 1.x to me. I hope Walter will clean this mess up, because when D is messy, it will never be taken seriously by real developers.

Dmedia Font Rendering tutorial

2007-06-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

yo, quick tip for people interested in rendering. If you want to learn all the new stuffies about professional text rendering and so on - you must visit dmedia. All-known-man,h3r3tic, finally created his own tutorial focusing on this subject. So if you have one or two nights to spare - don't wait and dig through this, because you can get a lot more from there than just text rendering skills.

Team0xf evolution

2007-06-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

First of all I want officially welcome two new members of team0xf: Anders and Leod o/~

Now - about the evolution. We have an idea about team0xf. We may try to change it into something more than just a team of developers coding Deadlock: the League. I brought the idea to make team0xf a group of people writing games in D. This concept have many bright sides - first, it will make something like for games and game related things - like bindings to libraries useful in game coding, libraries for games etc. Second the cooperation with people can give much - people could help each other, discuss and solve each other problems. Third it would be easier to find artists who would want to help. Also maybe people will easier create teams to code games. There are several more obvious advantages.

So team0xf.com can soon become D game programming centre. For now we created the beginning of the dev wiki.

What will be - time will tell. For now we bought our own slice host account. After the exams the site will evolve. Deadlock: the League will get its own sub-page and we will make team0xf.com more general.

Exams Break

2007-06-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Finally I found time to write something here.
About Deadlock. As an official uni project. It is finished. It had its official presentation in May. Result: 2nd place in the competition. We were beaten by a program for bike riders using GPS and google maps. Comments... There were a discussion about this on d newsgroup, so I don't want to repeat myself. Here you can find it

The presentation in polish can be found here. You must select `PZ2007` section on the left and select the date to may... for example 31/05/2007 . You will see the list where you should select `Deadlock`. Project which was first is called `Nabuhodonozor` and you can find it's presentation too. I will publish version with English translation after the exams. I will inform about it in my next post i hope.

As for the project - it surely will be continued. Now because of the exams (which are more problematic this year than we have expected) we were made to freeze the project, and the betatests. One must be said Deadlock project is finished and my university is its official owner. This summer we are starting Deadlock: the League, which will be Deadlock continuation, but it will be owned by team0xf. So right after the exams (which should and 5th July) we will continue work on Deadlock: the League.

The work here will concentrate on fixing some annoying issues we had no time to work on before the presentation, add some features, and the most important - isolate the game and the engine. So after that we will have Deadlock: the League working on the Deadlock Engine.

Among many issues related with Deadlock: the League i will work also on Necrophilia. First of all I will change it's name because it's a serious project now and need a serious name. I will work on it a little (making it even more flexible) and add ragdoll special functionalities (I will write about it later when it will be finished. After this works I will make tutorial on dmedia and post a appropriate note on news group and here.

This summer will be full of work, but I'm happy. Finally I would be able to code without caring about university issues.

Good Night.

Poser dream? Rather a nightmare

2007-02-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

Yes. There it was! Great program for modelling and animating people. Realistic models, much free stuff (clothes, texture, animations, models), big society. What can be better for an fps game? What's more there was a *free* cdkey to get while offer. So ok. Whole team0xf despite the server overload, managed to get couple of cdkeys and downloaded it.
On first sight - great. Really neat models, easy to make face/skin textures. Tools to make basic animations (like walk designer, where you can configure really everything). Poses making it easy to do keyframe animations. Simulation stuff to make clothes look cool and realistic while animation. Python scripting. w00t i said. And started to act. Learned basics...
Ok, now it's time to export it. first - 3ds format... wait... no animation export possibility, no bone/skeleton export possibility... neither in standard nor in scripts... I wrote an email to e-frontier. and they answered that it's not possible to export skeletons, bones or animations neither in poser 5 nor in 7 ... Dang! too bad... there was the dream - still we must skin the biped with the models, calculate envelopes.. making animaitons in standard 3ds max way... but ok, still we have modelling tool right? with clothes textures and stuff! lets export to 3ds .
first thing to check... model summary... what? 90 k polygons... 40 k vertices? hmmm but ok.. it supposed to be *realistic* so it's just heavy.. now i understand why everything in poser was taking so long.. but - ok! lets lod (level of details) it! oh noes! it's made of pieces... blocks... after lod it's all cracking and deforming ... even holes appear... heh.... and the basic model pose... it's also crap! and to pose it right... in poser... dang, not so easy...
That's how we've resigned from using Poser.

The conclusion.
Maybe poser can be used for animations, but not for game developers. It is designed to be the animaiton center. And other things should be, in their concept, only used for modeling stuffed used in animations. Too sad it's not flexible at all. So my advice is - don't use Poser. it's crap.

Hello

2007-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

I'm Peter, Peter Modzelewski. In the web most people know me as KeYeR. I'm a student at University of Nicolaus Copernicus studying computer technology and programming. My hobby is to code, especially - games. Now I'm working with great people to write a fps game - deadlock. Altogether we've created team0xf (team fifteen). For now I'm responsible for render and music part of the engine. First thing I've done is loading and simple rendering BSP levels. BSP is quite comfortable format for us: many cool levels are free to download, so for now we can just use ready ones to test the engine, and then make our own, in tools made for it. Now I'm working on skeletal animation. The most important thing about Deadlock despite the fact it will be great, is that we write it in D. D is my favourite language. And here is the reason I'm creating that blog. I want to shere with you things about game programming, implementations and stuff. I think it could be quite interesting for you to read. I want also to tell something bout D, and programming in it specially in aspect of game writing, but not only. That are the plans. End of the post for now. Back to coding :)