Last update July 3, 2016

Neighbor Hood



Our Neighborhood consists of online communities (usegroups, BBS and wikis) with similar topics.

Table of contents of this page
Getting Around   
Getting Help   
Finding Projects/Hosting   
Dynamics of DSource   
Searching with search engines   
Newsgroup posts   
Documentation   
The D Community   
D Videos   
Online communities about programming   
External information sites   
Related   

Getting Around    

Becoming part of the community can be difficult, especially when you don't know the flow, or where to find people. There are a lot of places to go, but one must also know where not to go.

The official documentation for library and specification is found at dlang.org.

Getting Help    

When you want to learn more about D it is best to know where to ask. Everyone of importance is found in the newsgroups. The IRC channel has grown and is a great place for quick help and questions on D. And there is help to be found on StackOverflow which tend to get relaid to the newsgroup by someone.

Finding Projects/Hosting    

The official repository is GitHub along with Phobos' brother Deimos, repositories of C bindings. And you'll find that many projects get hosted there. You can find projects in other locations like Bitbucket, but several have moved to GitHub?.

A dedicated hosting site for D is over at dsource.org. There are active projects found here, but many have discontinued development and only support v1 and older. It can at times be better to take an older project then to start from scratch.

Dynamics of DSource    

DSource has its own little quirks. DSource has been on a decline of participation and is mainly an archive of latent projects. This is very similar to the problems of Sourceforge, just on a smaller scale. Not only are there projects but you will also find tutorials and forums. The forums are a little misleading, much like the Google group, there isn't much activity there. It doesn't hurt to ask your question about a project on the forum, but you are more likely to get answers by asking on that projects IRC channel if it has one, or the newsgroups. Some projects do make use of these forums though, so check the activity.

It is also important to note that there is a division in the projects. There are those that are developing on one of the standard libraries: Phobos and Tango. Some have packages for both, but it is something to watch out for.

Searching with search engines    

Googling for "D" is useless in looking for D related web sites. But Googling for "D programming" or "D programming language" works rather well.

So, for everyone who maintains a web page on D, please refer to it at least once per page as "D programming language" rather than just "D". This should help significantly both with your page rank and general findability for those interested in D.

Newsgroup posts    

If you want to avoid asking the same question that someone else has already asked I've got some tips, but they're not foolproof. But that's okay since we won't jump all over you for asking a common question again.

You can search the old newsgroup archives by using the Digital Mars search form. Typically, the very newest posts aren't searchable by this method due to the delay in Google in indexing the archive and the archives may have not been updated recently.

The new web interface to the DigitalMars newsgroups/forum has been running since 2012. This is the preferred way if browsing the newsgroups on the web, as it allows three convenient screen layouts. It's also much faster, and it also has a search function on the top right corner. You can post directly in this forum after having subscribed.

Alternatively, you can follow this newsgroup with a newsreader (such as Mozilla Thunderbird or MS Outloook). It's easier to follow threads, posts show up quicker, posts can be cancelled, and you can usually sort or filter on Subject. For example with Thunderbird, there's a "Subject or Sender contains" box where I can type search criteria.

The forum is fully synchronized with the newsgroups, so that you can post from either method and both the newsgroups and the forum will be updated immediately. NG: Is there a way to search this newsgroup?

Documentation    

  1. If you just want to search Phobos (as you did in your example), you can use a more specific search by using a "site" command (such as "outBuffer site:http://www.digitalmars.com/d/phobos/") at Google.
  2. Since the spec is part of the documentation included with the compiler, you can (and this works for all of the spec, not just Phobos) download the compiler and search the .html files off-line. Not the simplest solution, but if you run into this problem often it might be worth the effort.
  3. If you could live with searching out-of-date documentation, you could download a PDF snapshot of the specification.

The D Community    

D Videos    

Videos

Online communities about programming    

External information sites    

Related    


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Edit text of this page (date of last change: July 3, 2016 9:12 (diff))