Some of you may recall the two conversations I had with Walter a while back, part of what I called the 'D Community Conversations' series. I've long planned to get that going as a regular, monthly thing. Finally, the time has come.

I want to thank Martin Kinkelin for agreeing to sit down with me to chat about his road to programming and to the D language, how he ended up as the lead maintainer of LDC, and some of the details about the role.

I very much enjoyed our conversation. I hope you do, too. You can find it here:

https://youtu.be/XpPV5OBJEvg

The full playlist is here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIldXzSkPUXXEL-2gfragUgNC2P2Yw6au&si=jih87SW_4A7jwRt5

Look for the next episode on the last weekend in February.

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 18:11:24 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

Hey Mike and Martin,
It's very nice that you took the time to have this conversation and record it! Great to be able to put a face to an internet name, and hear a little about someones back story :)

I'm happy you touched on Martin's CI work besides his programming contributions, because CI/packaging is probably not something many people think about when you say "compiler development". The (continued) work on CI and automatic release packaging by Martin has been enormous. It has taken a huge amount of time and effort - and I'm sure a lot of frustration went along with it - but the end result really is stellar. As Martin mentions, it works for forks as well, great stuff.

cheers,
Johan

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 19:12:39 UTC, Johan wrote:

And it is a work that makes a complete difference. Trying always to "Build It Yourself" is always a huge pain. There's too much setup to be done, and as a cross platform developer, I can see how much work it is going there. At least my latest 200 commits has been on smooth UX across the platforms for cross compiling. One can just wonder how much work it goes to that when you're a step lower on compiler development.

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 18:11:24 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

LDC is one of the most, if not THE most important project for D, it produces very fast and competitive executables, not only that but makes it possible to target all kind of platforms, including WebAssembly!

Other languages dream of having this DMD + LDC combo, very fast iteration time with debug builds thanks to DMD and very fast production code thanks to LDC!

It's super interesting to be able to listen to Martin's story, i keep hear about how LLVM is painful to work with, mostly during version upgrades.. I admire you, thanks!

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 18:11:24 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

Thanks to Martin for his hard work on LDC!