Luca's meaningless thoughts  

Definition by Wikipedia:

A plug computer is a small form factor network-attached server for use in the home. It is a lower cost and lower power alternative to a PC-based home server. In effect, a plug computer is a network appliance that is fully enclosed in an AC power plug or AC adapter.

Look at this little bastard (up to 2Ghz CPU, 512MB of RAM + 512MB of flash memory, 1.8" hard drive, gigabit ethernet, SD reader, USB, Wi-fi, Bluetooth, under USD100):

Runs Linux and it's supposed to be fully open source.

I want one! =)

Motivated by a couple of long waited forward references bug fixes in the DMD front-end, I decided to experiment merging it into LDC.

The task wasn't so hard, just apply the patches, ignore changes to the back-end (mostly), resolve some conflicts and you're done!

Christian Kamm kindly helped me with a couple of doubts when resolving conflicts and I got commit access to the LDC repository in the way (thanks for the vote of confidence, even when LDC are very relaxed when giving commit access :).

However I found a changeset that was a little harder to merge: r251, which added support for appending dchar to a char[] (fixing bug 111, another long waited one). The problem was, 2 new runtime functions were added (_d_arrayappendcd and arrayappendwdarrayappendwd) but I didn't know how to tell the back-end about them.

Trying to compile Dil with the new LDC with the DMD 1.055 front-end, I discovered this change also added a regression. So I tried to fix those two issues before pushing my patches, but Christian told me I should push them first and fix the problems later. I really prefer the other way around, but I won't tell the LDC developers how to run the project :), so I did it [*].

Christian disabled the new feature later because Tango is still lacking the new runtime functions, so LDC can't do much about them yet. I filled a bug so this issue don't get lost.

I would be nice to have some feedback if you try the new merged front-end in LDC :)