Getting started with sparkles:base

This tutorial builds one tiny program that uses the most common base building blocks: SmallBuffer, the @nogc text writers, styled IES rendering, and CoreLogger.

What you need

• A D compiler and dub.
• Five minutes.

Step 1 — a single-file program

Create base_tour.d with this header:

#!/usr/bin/env dub
/+ dub.sdl:
    name "base_tour"
    dependency "sparkles:base" version="*"
+/

Everything below goes into the same file.

Step 2 — write text without the GC

SmallBuffer is an output range with inline storage. The text writers write directly into it:

import core.time : dur;
import sparkles.base.smallbuffer : SmallBuffer;
import sparkles.base.text.writers : writeDuration, writeIntegerPadded;

SmallBuffer!(char, 64) line;
writeIntegerPadded(line, 7, 3);
line ~= ' ';
writeDuration(line, dur!"msecs"(1_500));

Step 3 — render styled IES

The styled-template parser accepts D Interpolated Expression Sequences and can either emit ANSI styles or strip markup:

import sparkles.base.styled_template : plainText;

auto status = plainText(i"{green ready} after $(line[])");

Step 4 — install a logger

initLogger installs a DeltaTimeLogger for both Phobos and Sparkles logging globals. The output includes live timestamps, so this tutorial does not print a log line in the verified output; see Log through CoreLogger for a deterministic logger example.

import sparkles.base.logger : LogLevel, initLogger;

initLogger(LogLevel.info);

The whole program

#!/usr/bin/env dub
/+ dub.sdl:
    name "base_tour"
    dependency "sparkles:base" version="*"
+/
import core.time : dur;
import std.stdio : writeln;

import sparkles.base.logger : LogLevel, initLogger;
import sparkles.base.smallbuffer : SmallBuffer;
import sparkles.base.styled_template : plainText;
import sparkles.base.text.writers : writeDuration, writeIntegerPadded;

void main()
{
    SmallBuffer!(char, 64) line;
    writeIntegerPadded(line, 7, 3);
    line ~= ' ';
    writeDuration(line, dur!"msecs"(1_500));

    auto status = plainText(i"{green ready} after $(line[])");

    initLogger(LogLevel.info);

    writeln(line[]);
    writeln(status);
}

007 1.5s
ready after 007 1.5s

What you learned

You wrote into stack-first storage, formatted numbers and durations without GC allocation, stripped styled IES markup, and installed the Sparkles logger.

Where to go next

• Write @nogc text for focused text writer patterns.
• Log through CoreLogger for the new logging interface.
• API index for module-level lookup.