Kickoff of Drokue

[Charles D Hixson]

Manfred Nowak wrote:
> Drokue http://www.mjoelk.de/drokue
> is a rogue to the Digital Mars D programming language. 
> 
> The purpose of drokue is to accompany the evolution of Digital Mars D 
> by decorating it with further elements. 
> 
> Drokue's vision is to explore D's capabilities to 
> 
>  * be augmented by further syntactical constructs
>  * serve domain specific adaptations like ad-hoc defined syntactical
>    sugar
>  * diverse into domain specific languages by building in support for
>    compiler construction.
>  * control work and information flow of programs by building in support
>    for protocols
> 
> The base for this spin-off was laid in the thread containing 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/pnews/read.php?
> server=news.digitalmars.com&group=digitalmars.D&artnum=45660
> 
> Manfred_Nowak

A reasonable idea, and it did say that it should be based 
around D 1.0, which makes this timely.  OTOH, there's no 
indication of a direction.  In what way is this designed to 
differ from D?

The only reasonable extension that occurs to me is an kind of 
interpreter version with dynamic objects.  This is less needed 
in D than in many languages, but it would provide coverage of 
a part of the language continuum that D doesn't attempt to 
handle.  Currently this is being addressed by, e.g., PyD, 
which links Python with D.  I can see a use for a more 
strictly D superset that made easy linkage to D.  Several 
similar ideas have been implemented for other languages, e.g., 
goo & Java.  If you do this I would suggest that you carefully 
address the problems of persistent objects, specifically how 
to reload them without knowing the type of the object in 
advance.  (See Python's Pickle.)

That said... do you believe that you can manage enough support 
to create a viable branch to do such?  The D community is 
rather small, and I'm not certain that it's large enough to 
support a major fork.  (GDC doesn't really count, as it 
attempt to maintain strict compatibility with DMD, and shares 
a part of the same code base.)