Ocean is a general purpose library, compatible with both D1 and D2, with a focus on supporting the development of high-performance, real-time applications. This focus has led to several noteworthy design choices:
- Ocean is not cross-platform. The only supported platform is Linux.
- Ocean assumes a single-threaded environment. Fiber-based multi-tasking is favoured, internally.
- Ocean aims to minimise use of the D garbage collector. GC collect cycles can be very disruptive to real-time applications, so Ocean favours a model of allocating resources once then reusing them, wherever possible.
Ocean began life as an extension of Tango, some elements of which were eventually merged into Ocean.
By default all development in Ocean is done in D1, but using a subset that is almost D2 comptaible (and with the help of d1to2fix, it can be fully converted to D2).
That said, for now Ocean is only intended to work with D 2.070.x, but even that
is not possible at the moment because of some changes needed in the upstream
compiler that are still pending. Because of this a patched transitional
compiler is needed. The patches needed to compile the dmd-transitional
compiler are located in docker/dmd-transitional/patches.
We are working with upstream to get this issue sorted out as soon as possible. To track progress or read more details, please subscribe to issue #9.
Also, as far as D2 upstream get serious about hassle-free upgrading to new compiler versions, expect Ocean to lag behind latest upstream releases for a few versions.
This library has quite a few number of dependencies, but it depends on which modules you want to use. Usually the easiest way to find out is just using it and see which libraries the linker fails to find and then install by demand.
If you want to install everything, then the list is as follows (for an
absolutely up to date list you can take a look at the Build.mak file, in
the $O/%unittests target):
-lglib-2.0-lpcre-lxml2-lxslt-lebtree-lreadline-lhistory-llzo2-lbz2-lz-ldl-lgcrypt-lgpg-error-lrt
Please note that ebtree is not the vanilla upstream version. We created our
own fork of it to be able to write D bindings more easily. You can find the
needed ebtree library in https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/ebtree/releases
(look only for the v6.0.socioX releases, some pre-built Ubuntu packages are
provided).
If you plan to use the provided Makefile (you need it to convert code to
D2, or to run the tests), you need to also checkout the submodules with git
submodule update --init. This will fetch the Makd project in submodules/makd.
Once you have all the dependencies installed, you need to convert the code to D2 (if you want to use it in D2). For this you also need to build/install the d1to2fix tool.
Also, make sure you have the Makd submodule properly updated (see the previous section for instructions), then just type:
make d2conv
To run the tests using D2 you can use:
make DVER=2
ocean's versioning follows Neptune.
This means that the major version is increased for breaking changes, the minor version is increased for feature releases, and the patch version is increased for bug fixes that don't cause breaking changes.
- Major branch development period: 6 months
- Maintained minor versions: 2 most recent
| Major | Initial release date | Supported until |
|---|---|---|
| v2.x.x | v2.0.0: 30/06/2016 | 10/09/2017 |
| v3.x.x | v3.0.0: 10/03/2017 | TBD |
Latest release notes | All releases
Releases are handled using GitHub releases. The notes associated with a major or minor github release are designed to help developers to migrate from one version to another. The changes listed are the steps you need to take to move from the previous version to the one listed.
The release notes are structured in 3 sections, a Migration Instructions, which are the mandatory steps that users have to do to update to a new version, Deprecated which contains deprecated functions that are recommended not to use but will not break any old code, and the New Features which are optional new features available in the new version that users might find interesting. Using them is optional, but encouraged.