About this library

ae (almost everything) is an auxiliary general-purpose D library. Its design goals are composability and simplicity.

Among many things, it implements an asynchronous event loop, and several network protocols, such as HTTP / IRC / TLS.

Overview

The library is split into the following packages:

• ae.demo – This package contains a few demos for various parts of the library.
• ae.net – All the networking code (event loop, HTTP, NNTP, IRC) lives here.
• ae.sys – Utility code which primarily interfaces with other systems (including the operating system).
• ae.ui – Framework for creating 2D games and graphical applications (SDL, OpenGL).
• ae.utils – Utility code which primarily manipulates data.

Notable sub-packages:

• ae.sys.d – Builds arbitrary versions of D. Shared by Digger, DAutoTest, and TrenD.
• ae.sys.net – High-level synchronous API for accessing network resources (URLs). Includes implementations based on cURL, WinINet, and ae.net.
• ae.utils.functor – Functor primitives and functions, allowing @nogc range manipulation and text formatting.
• ae.utils.graphics – Contains a templated graphical context optimized for speed, and basic support for a few image formats.
• ae.utils.promise – Implementation of Promises/A+, async/await, and related operations. Can be used on top of the ae.net asynchronous API.
• ae.utils.time – Supplements core.time and std.datetime with extras such as PHP-like parsing / formatting and floating-point duration operations.

General concepts:

• Data: Many modules that handle raw data (from the network / disk) do so using the Data structure, defined in ae.sys.data. See the module documentation for a description of the type; the quick version is that it is a type equivalent to void[], with a few benefits. Some modules use DataVec, a Data vector with deterministic lifetime, to minimize copying / reallocations when handling byte streams with unknown length.

• Networking: ae uses asynchronous event-based networking. A select-based event loop dispatches events to connection objects, which then propagate them to higher-level code as necessary. libev support is also available.

• UI: The ae.ui package contains basic support for cross-platform interactive applications using SDL. There is a working game demo in ae.demo.pewpew.

What uses this library?

• DFeed (forum.dlang.org) - networking, SQLite
• Digger - ae.sys.d
• DAutoTest - ae.sys.d, web server
• btdu - utility functions, duration parsing, functors
• monocre - image processing
• Community WormNET services for Worms Armageddon (web snooper, community server, HostingBuddy)
• Most of my D projects
• Find more uses on GitHub

Documentation

You may peruse the documentation generated from DDoc on ae.dpldocs.info.

Other ways to get started with this library is to:

• Play with the demo programs (in the demo directory)
• Look at open-source projects using this library (see above)
• Use your editor's "go to definition" feature to navigate the implementation.

Using this library

• If you are using Dub, simply add a dependency to ae (or a subpackage) in your project.

  The main package has no additional dependencies, with the rest of the library being split out into sub-packages which have additional dependencies (such as OpenSSL).

  See dub.sdl for details.

• If you are not using Dub, note that this library has multiple entry points and many optional dependencies, so compiling and linking all *.d files into a single library will not work. In this circumstance, the best way is to simply use recursive compilation (rdmd or dmd -i).

  You can achieve strong versioning and avoid configuring compiler import paths by setting it up as a git submodule in your project's root, as seen here.

Versioning

There are currently no stable/development branches, and versioning is done only according to the number of commits in master.

Breaking changes are prefixed with [BREAKING] in the commit message. Each such commit includes a rationale and instructions for updating affected code.

Tags are created regularly for the benefit of Dub packages (e.g. Digger).

The bleeding-edge version can be found in the next branch (which may be regularly force-pushed).

License

Except where stated otherwise, this library is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. (Approximate summary: you only need to publish the source code of the files from this library that you edited.)

Modules under licenses other than MPL are:

• ae.utils.digest_murmurhash3 - D port of a C MurmurHash3 implementation. Public Domain.
• ae.utils.graphics.fonts.font8x8 - Data for an 8x8 bitmap font created by Daniel Hepper. Public Domain.
• ae.utils.graphics.hls - Code to convert between RGB and HLS. Ported from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. License unclear.
• ae.utils.text.parsefp - Parse floating-point values from strings. Adapted from Phobos. Boost License 1.0.