BradleyChatha

(I'm not the author, but I'm pretty sure he lurks around HN sometimes).

A quick summary directly lifted from the blog post:

In this blog, I’ll go over some features of D and how I use them to make games. The TL;DR is:

    * A single language for game logic and scripting.
    * Fast compile times under 1 second.
    * The freedom to choose the best memory allocation strategy.
    * Achieving C-like speed with a much cleaner developer experience.

The quality does definitely seem to vary depending on the spec.

As someone who's not very well-learned I found x.690 to be my personal gold standard for how a specification should be written - it left me with very few questions, and after a small period of getting used to its general use of language, didn't struggle too much with it.

x.680 (the 2003 revision more so than the 2021 one) on the other hand has definitely given me a few struggles with general comprehension, and leaving me some similar feelings. I believe that to be an issue of how they've structured the spec (and how they've spread out some important info across multiple specs).

I'm in the camp of I like it, but I also love to complain about things (see: my inability to say "I love D" without also bringing up other faults).

I've been enjoying my time with the project overall, but it's one of those things where it's like "it hurts in a mostly good way".

I think if I were more seasoned with ASN.1 itself, as well as with compiler development it'd have been a smoother experience.

Though I definitely still could've chosen more higher value things to do throughout the last year :D

> As someone who extended the ASN.1 parser in the Netscape code base to handle PKCS#12

Sounds like you have some fun potential war stories in that case.

Ah sorry, emotions and written text are always a hard thing to put together.

Thank you :)

Yeah I know I'm making fun of it a lot (mostly in jest) but it genuinely is a really interesting specification, and it's definitely sad - but not surprising - it's not a very popular choice outside of its few niche areas.

:) Glad to see someone else who's gone down this road as well.

:)

Honestly any compiler project in pure C is pretty hardcore in my eyes, ASN.1 must amplify the sheer horror.

Not heard of either of those projects before, but I love how libasn1's README has a thinly veiled hint of disdain for ASN.1

> which can transform ASN.1 into a much more parseable JSON AST

The sign of a person who's been hurt, and doesn't want others to feel the same pain :D

Yeah, the foundations of the language are incredible. It's just everything else around it that brings it down (and is unfortunately very hard to motivate people to solve).

D definitely missed a critical period, but I love it all the same.

It makes me laugh that absolutely no one can say "I've worked with ASN.1" in a positive light :D

In short: I wanted to talk a bit about ASN.1, a bit about D, and a bit about the compiler itself, but couldn't think of any real cohesive format.

So I threw a bunch of semi-related ramblings together and I'm daring to call it a blog post.

Sorry in advance since I will admit it's not the greatest quality, but it's really not easy to talk about so much with such brevity (especially since I've already forgot a ton of stuff I wanted to talk about more deeply :( )