New D programming language forum, written entirely in D

http://forum.dlang.org/

by rpeden • 14 years ago

97 26 14 years ago

forum.dlang.org

rpeden• 14 years ago

The source is available on github:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

dark_c• 14 years ago

The site is amazingly fast (at least subjectively), even though there must be a higher traffic coming from HN. Has anyone inspected the code to see how it's done and if there's some kind of a web framework for D?

hasenj• 14 years ago

It looks like web.d implements the response handler from scratch, so I doubt there's a framework. Maybe a framework will be extracted from this in the future.

It looks like there isn't even a template language -- it seems to build the html using the plain old string concatenation method.

  html.put(
   `<tr class="thread-post-row`, (post.info && post.id==selectedID ? ` thread-post-focused thread-post-selected` : ``), `">`
  `<td>`
    `<div style="padding-left: `, format("%1.1f", OFFSET_INIT + level * offsetIncrement), OFFSET_UNITS, `">`
      `<div class="thread-post-time">`, summarizeTime(post.time, true), `</div>`,
      `<a class="postlink `, (user.isRead(post.rowid) ? "forum-read" : "forum-unread" ), `" href="`, encodeEntities(idToUrl(post.id)), `">`, truncateString(post.author, 20), `</a>`
    `</div>`
    `</td>`
  `</tr>`);

CyberShadow6• 14 years ago

I plan to move to HTML templates in a future version. It shouldn't affect performance.

EnderMB2• 14 years ago

It's probably not the deciding option, but the front-end code is only just over 20K because outside of a few images and a stylesheet there's very little going on.

A lot of Web Designers today tend to completely forget that page size matters, and that just because many of us have broadband connection it's no reason to throw JS and screen size images everywhere.

judofyr• 14 years ago

Hacker News is smaller, yet takes longer to serve: http://cl.ly/31360A1E2s2j031s0S2O

tintin• 14 years ago

Funny that people notice this. I think this is how all pages on the internet should be! Lately I'm getting tired of all those fancy Javascript pages or pages build on bloated frameworks.

The speed of this forum has nothing to do with D. You can achieve this in a language like PHP as well.

Just skip the bloat (server and client side).

CyberShadow6• 14 years ago

Here are some of the things that play a part in the forum's performance:

* Optimized and deflated static resources

* Deflated HTML output

* SQLite prepared statements

* Integrated HTTP server (although it's currently in front of an Apache proxy)

* An optimized string builder (https://github.com/CyberShadow/DAppenderResearch)

* RAM cache of frequent DB queries

While there are equivalents available for interpreted/CGI languages (e.g. opcode caches, memcached), there is still a significant performance advantage. With a warm cache, most pages can be written out in under 5ms, and the busiest in under 50.

For some perspective, the time needed to compose the busiest view (threaded or split-view) halved when I moved from naive string concatenation to an optimized appender.

dkersten• 14 years ago

In browsing on an android device and its incredibly responsive for me. Much more than other sites ive browsed on this phone today.

javadyan• 14 years ago

Hell yes, that's what I'm talking about. We need good tools in nice, statically typed, native languages to make web applications!

gaius• 14 years ago

Opa/OCaml?

wingo• 14 years ago

Nicely done!

tl• 14 years ago

It looks site your main site is still linking to the old forum:

HN -> http://forum.dlang.org/ -> http://dlang.org/overview.html -> http://digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I have always thought D was an interesting language. I never got into it because I thought it was pretty dormant. Has it been resurrected?

stonemetal• 14 years ago

The core team never went dormant. There was a point where the community seemed to have contracted sharply, back before 1.0. Is that what you mean? If so then yeah it seems to have turned itself around.

CyberShadow6• 14 years ago

There's been an explosion of contributions to the compiler, runtime and standard library since their development was moved to GitHub about a year ago.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Cool! I may consider trying it again. Are the gcc or LLVM compilers up to date these days?

thebigshane2• 14 years ago

   D's design goals attempt to combine the performance of 
   compiled languages with the safety and expressive power 
   of modern dynamic languages. Idiomatic D code is 
   commonly as fast as equivalent C++ code, while being 
   shorter and memory-safe.

D seems to have similar goals with Go (golang). Has anybody here used both?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_%28programming_language%29]

thebigshane2• 14 years ago

For those interested, more info on the differences between D and Go: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3554956/d-versus-go-compa...

More different than I thought.

New D programming language forum, written entirely in D

Related Stories