Wojciech Szęszoł is a Computer Science major at the University of Wrocław. As part of Google Summer of Code 2016, he chose to make improvements to Jacob Carlborg’s DStep, a tool to generate D bindings from C and Objective-C header files.

It was December of last year and I was writing an image processing project for a course at my university. I would normally use Python, but the project required some custom processing, so I wasn’t able to use numpy. And writing the inner loops of image processing algorithms in plain Python isn’t the best idea. So I decided to use D.

I’ve been conscious about the existence of the D language for as long as I can remember, but I’d never convinced myself before to try it out. The first thing I needed to do was to load an image. At the time, I didn’t know that there is a DUB repository containing bindings to image loading libraries, so I started writing bindings to libjpeg by myself. It didn’t end very well, so I thought there should be a tool that will do the job for me. That’s when I found DStep and htod.

Unluckily, the capabilities of DStep weren’t satisfying (mostly the lack of any kind of support for the preprocessor) and htod didn’t run on Linux. I ended up coding my project in C++, but as GSoC (Google Summer of Code) was lurking on the horizon, I decided that I should give it a try with DStep. I began by contacting Craig Dillabaugh (Ed. Note: Craig volunteers to organize GSoC projects using D) to learn if there was any need for developing such a project. It sparked some discussion on the forum, the idea was accepted, and, more importantly, Russel Winder agreed to be the mentor of the project. After some time I needed to prepare and submit an official proposal. There was an interview and fortunately I was accepted.

The first commit I made for DStep is dated to February, 1. It was a proof of concept that C preprocessor definitions can be translated to D using libclang. Then I improved the testing framework by replacing the old Cucumber-based tests with some written in D. I made a few more improvements before the actual GSoC coding period began.

During GSoC, I added support for translation of preprocessor macros (constants and functions). It required implementing a parser for a small part of the C language as the information from libclang was insufficient. I implemented translation of comments, improved formatting of the output code (e.g. made DStep keep the spacing from C sources), fixed most of the issues from the GitHub issue list and ported DStep to Windows. While I was coding I was getting support from Jacob Carlborg. He did a great job by reviewing all of the commits I made. When I didn’t know how to accomplish something with D, I could always count on help on forum.dlang.org.

DStep was the first project of such a size that I coded in D. I enjoyed its modern features, notably the module system, garbage collector, built-in arrays, and powerful templates. I used unittest blocks a lot. It would be nice to have named unit tests, so that they can be run selectively. From the perspective of a newcomer, the lack of consistency and symmetry in some features is troubling, at least before getting used to it. For example there is a built-in hash map and no hash set, some identifiers that should be keywords starts with @ (Ed. Note: see the Attributes documentation), etc. I was very sad when I read that the in keyword is not yet fully implemented. Despite those little issues, the language served me very well overall. I suppose I will use D for my personal toy projects in the future. And for DStep of course. I have some unfinished business with it :).

I would like to encourage all students to take part in future editions of GSoC. And I must say the D Language Foundation is a very good place to do this. I learned a lot during this past summer and it was a very exciting experience.